The Plans I Have for You is a twisting, gut-dropping rollercoaster that takes you completely off the rails. This book is sharp and disturbing, and intentionally destabilizing in a way that leaves you reeling hours after you turn the last page.

There are so many deeply tangled threads that create such a layered experience. This book, by nature, refuses flattening. What impressed me the most was its central focus on cancel culture and internet surveillance. There's something chilling about seeing the modern experience projected in such a horrific way, placing you in the headspace of someone who had the worst day of their life filmed and posted to viral fame.

The fact that everyone everywhere has a camera in their hands at all times, and how quickly that can become a weapon. How quickly virality can strip its subjects of humanity, flattening them as the public demands clean heroes and villains, easy black-and-white moral boxes that end in dehumanization and erased interiority.

The Plans I Have for You mirrors the experience of being a spectator, a surveillant in the panopticon of modern life, in a brilliant, twisted way. Constantly playing with morality and forcing her characters into choices that get darker and darker, Sanders asks the reader to reckon with their own inner compass, to recognize in real time what it feels like to have your predetermined categories shattered, to feel the seduction and collapse of moral certainty.

The novel's horror is quiet and simmering, a spiral that spins out of control, much like a moment that goes viral overnight. Virality is contagion; characters blend into one another and identities collapse and roles reverse as victims become villains and larger-than-life aggressors become pitiful and legible. Choices and influences become so tangled that every easy answer is refused.

Behind the uncomfortable thrill of navigating a web of fucked-up choices that sometimes make too much sense, there is the recurring symbolism of inheritance. The cultural pressure of being a first-generation Asian immigrant, the familial expectation of making your ancestors' sacrifices mean something, and emotional survival patterns imprinted on us from the cycles that we were born into.

When love is a transaction, when sacrifice means debt is owed and worth is proven, when intimacy begets obligation, and when acceptance must be earned, the line between attachment and codependency wears thin. The Plans I Have for You explores the complexity of intimacy becoming the site of power, and the impossibility of tearing apart the threads of manipulation and emotional attunement.

Sanders forces the reader to face the complicated reality of vulnerability; how control and care and love and damage can create a cocktail of dependency that feels impossible to escape. Refusing, yet again, any easy answer and any easy category, to show how love can heal and harm in tandem, and how the most effective forms of control can sometimes show up wrapped in care.

The scariest part isn't that the characters are inherently evil, but that they are infinitely relatable, built upon foundations of trauma and operating by a logic that at times feels eerily coherent. We are all constrained by the systems and cycles that produced us, and yet we are still responsible for every choice we make.

This debut is ambitious as hell, and Sanders does not shy away from its difficulty. The Plans I Have For You is a deeply unsettling exploration of how surveillance culture, inherited trauma, and transactional models of care create people who both suffer under and perpetuate the same systems of violence. Even when they believe they are correcting harm, even when they believe they are severing the past, and even when they believe they are morally just.

I received an ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

a story that touches on finding someone—anyone🏳️‍🌈⁉️—to love you as yourself, even if you’re an assassin. especially if you’re an assassin, but it is very much possible!

hikaru gero must find someone who will want to continue his infamous family line in order to let his sister be with the one she truly loves🏳️‍🌈. except he sucks at intimacy. he sucks at social situations unless it involves killing them😅

he decides to make a personal sacrifice to protect his family and, maybe, he can learn to be open to the possibility that he is worth loving.

this has the potential to be very queer yearning coded but i doubt it will end up that way 🥲 (i’m so curious how the two main characters in this book progress their relationship!)

gero’s abilities are still a mystery!! how he doing alladat🙈🙈🙈 hopefully second book will expand on what the last chapter provided.

i will say i do love that the main character gero has a birthmark on his face that is not mentioned at all in this book. as someone also with a birthmark on my face, i grew up having literally everyone comment on it so i appreciate this lil (possibly nothing?) detail lol 🙈

What does it mean to fall in love with someone you’ve never met and probably have no chance of meeting?

To me, the story of This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is not so much a story of science fiction and alternative timelines, but of seeking connection in a hostile world. A world that will say you’ve been “groomed” for befriending the wrong person and allowing them to open your mind to possibilities beyond your current life, for finding meaning and connection in any place that doesn’t further the goals of the society one was born into.

The drudgery and the particulars of the titular Time War and the tech that enable it don’t really matter. They’re window dressing at best. The goals of the opposing factions are ephemeral and perhaps intentionally Sisyphean. This is a novella that is stripped down to its barest parts like prose poetry. In general, this is used to great emotional effect, but at times I wish there was more to establish the different voices and point of views of the two leads.

However, I feel like its style strikes at the heart of what Time War trying to do: pure science fiction as allegory, those intense queer friendship and romances that exist half in fantasy and half in confessional correspondence. Do the leads love each other or are they clinging to the first person who actually sees them, the first person they dare to show their true selves to? Is it not a frightening and potentially self-destructive urge to explore what it means to have a ‘true self’ in a world that punishes that truth? Are these connections doomed? Is that perhaps part of the attraction? What does it mean when you are surrounded by people you are supposed to be united with but your true connections are with the ones who know that secret self you cannot share with the outside world?

To me, this is a story of desperation and the inevitability of love, whether it is romantic or a love born of community and solidarity. In the bleakest, most helpless of times, we find each other, we continue to live.