This genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman’s right to her own body.
...pulsates with this gender-expansive feminist rage, propelling a narrative at breakneck speed—sometimes literally, for the characters—that leaves no one exempt from misogyny’s horrifying control ... The plot may be fast-paced, but the dread builds with disquieting slowness as it moves us deeper, layer by layer, into the ways misogyny underlies and imbues every aspect of the body-hopping machine ... Throughout the novel, Tsamaase deftly demonstrates how misogyny’s fear of the feminine is connected to the possibility that the feminine can move ... Womb City is a searing feminist indictment of how misogyny, by coming for the feminine, is truly coming for us all.
Fearless ... Despite a few instances of clunky writing and repetition, Tsamaase brilliantly tackles ideas of motherhood and autonomy. The author seamlessly blends a body-hopping ghost story about revenge with a narrative about the importance of memory. It’s such an original first novel, and I’ll be reading whatever comes next.
As the book’s narrator, Nelah’s voice is captivating and valiant. Caught up in a forbidden extramarital affair, she manages to briefly elude her technological enslavement and later enters a murderous spiral of violent liberation. With both chilling precision and anguished passion, Womb City depicts a toxic future of cyber-reincarnation and authoritarian omniscience.
