Michael Hicks's Reviews > This World Is Not Yours

DNF at 40%.

I had to verify a few times over the course of my brief reading of This World Is Not Yours that I was, in fact, reading the right book. Over the last few days, I've been inundated with sponsored posts on my Facebook feed advertising this book as "nonstop action." The book's synopsis even describes this work as "action-packed" and promises the threat of an alien goo on a hostile world. Well, dear readers, at 40% in, I am still waiting for the action -- any action at all -- and the alien goo, the Gray, which exists to cleanse the world of invasive organisms, has only been briefly mentioned. The one big action set piece that has been introduced thus far, involving a raid on one colony by another hostile colony, has occurred entirely off-page and described only through exposition.

So, no action, and little to no alien goo thus far, and we're just shy of the half-way mark. The author, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, focuses instead on relationship drama between a dysfunctional polycule that has been mandated by the colony's government and torn apart a lesbian relationship to force our central protagonists into breeding with men. The central concern is whether or not Vinh and Amara's marriage can be saved, set against the lasting memory that Vinh has left Amara once before. I suppose, if one were to view this in a particularly skewed and slanted way, one might consider this a type of action, in much the sense that opening or closing a door is an action, just not a particularly exciting one. I, however, consider the handling of all this to be dull melodrama and boring relationship stuff.

I can't help but feel like there's been a bait-and-switch here between the book I thought I was getting when I requested this review copy, versus the book I actually got. But, one must review a work based on what it is and how well it goes about being that, rather than what one wanted or hoped it to be instead. Yes, I had hoped that This World Is Not Yours would be the next big work of alien horror, but the more I've read of it, up to this point, the more it has resisted and defied those expectations. What it is, then, based only on this book's roughly first half, is a toxic relationship drama that's presented to readers in the most deliberate and least interesting ways possible, despite offering a scenario still brimming with potential within this persistently at-odds and forced-upon dynamic. It's a book that's easy to set down and forget about, and that's exactly what I'm going to do now. I do like the cover, though, but even that promises more interest than the book can deliver.