Absurdist and speculative is certainly a good descriptor for this book. This one is for the people who like weird books. Unfortunately sometimes I felt like it got so weird that I struggled to picture what’s happening in my head, but mostly I was able to go with the flow and accept whatever strange thing is happening. The prose is quite beautiful, there’s definitely some gorgeous lines in here. I don’t think every story was a standout, like I said some were kind of hard to keep up with. It made me feel like I might be missing the point or should reread, which isn’t a bad thing. The story “The Wolves” really stood out in my mind as a 5/5, I will be thinking about that one for a while.

This was my first TJR book, so I didn’t know what to expect going in other then the fact that so many people praise this book and have given it a high rating. I found it to be just okay. It definitely is more romance than anything else, and a WLW romance to be specific. I really loved the space parts of the book, but that was probably 20-30% of the content as opposed to the rest being the developing relationship.

As a queer person, I think telling stories of queer people from before it was legal and accepted (which it still isn’t in many places) is so important. While this book told a nice getting together story, I don’t think it did a very good job of talking about real queer events at the time. I get that that’s not the point of the book, and I was going to give it a pass on this point, but then at the end the character mentions moving to SF to be out and proud on “some streets”. It was like these two women thought they were the only gay people in the world. I wish we had seen more of a queer community, or a longing for that even. I wish the pride parades of the 80s had been mentioned, literally even a mention of Stonewall. Unfortunately it felt like a very straight lesbian romance, and while I was quite empathetic for our characters about not being able to share who they really were, it also felt like the author didn’t want them to come out because it would be too complicated to write. There were out and proud gay people in the 80s. They didn’t not exist.

Speaking of too complicated to write, as the book progressed I began to have a feeling that we were skirting around the science for a reason. It’s fine to not have this be a sci-fi, I don’t mind. But it made the actual space part so short, which did keep me reading but didn’t help me be engaged in the other timeline. I also didn’t find the prose to be very moving. It was very dialogue heavy. I read “Orbital” recently and thought that did a much more stunning job of describing why people want to go to space and what it’s like being up there.

Ultimately it wasn’t a bad book, it is obviously very marketable and I’m glad so many people are reading and enjoying some lesbian romance. I will probably check out another TJR in the future, I own both Daisy Jones and the Evelyn Hugo.

What a fascinating book that had so much to say about gender, sexuality, literature, relationships, and more. This definitely won’t work for everyone but it was the right amount of weird and queer for me. I didn’t care for the AIDS conversation, it didn’t age well but other then that I thought was an interesting story.