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Tag: Premee Mohamed

Spoiler-Free Review: And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed (Out 7/20/21)

Published by J. Z. Kelley on July 10, 2021
Cover of And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

Genre: Science fiction
Audience: Adult
Series?: Standalone

Rating: Liked it

For fans of: The Handmaid’s Tale, Maria Haskins’ “Six Dreams About the Train,” Sarah Pinsker’s “The Court Magician,” Alyssa Wong’s “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers,” eco sci-fi, poetic literary speculative fiction

In a science-fiction world where only the very wealthy have funerals and everyone else is dumped into the ubiquitous filthy canals when they die, a high end courtesan comes back to life to take vengeance on her wealthy client/murderer. Jewel, the protagonist of And What Can We Offer You Tonight, is the dead girl’s friend. Having not been reanimated with a terrible purpose, Jewel’s concerns are more quotidian: meeting clients, looking after her fellow courtesans, and trying to keep from losing her job as a known associate of the vigilante dead girl haunting the city’s rich.

This is a tough novella to summarize and an even tougher one to review. It’s beautifully written. Despite being 75% run-on sentences, it never feels dense, just poetic. Jewel’s helpless, often directionless ruminating turns her world into an anxious kaleidoscope. The imagery of the courtesans’ elegant House contrasts with the crumbling city outside in a way that makes both of them seem equally alien and lovely, and Mohamed has a way of describing familiar objects like perfume that seems stranger than her futuristic technology. I wanted to highlight entire chapters.

It’s also, objectively, something that should really connect with me. I love class conflict stories and I love female characters that other reviewers call too passive or too violent or too morally impure and I love a run-on sentence. But it didn’t hook me behind the belly button the way I wanted it to, and I can’t really say why.

If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably that Jewel is very Hamlet. She wants everything and nothing. She can’t make up her mind. She acts only when her hand is forced by other, stronger willed characters. Her definite trait is her compulsion to smother her unpretty emotions in order to keep her job and her life (which is saying the same thing twice).

I don’t think this is a flaw in the writing. I mean, Hamlet. If anything, Jewel is too relatable. Her dystopian future world is too real. Like, I am living through real climate disasters and class warfare, I do not have any spare energy for lightly fictionalized versions of them.

On the other hand, reading lightly fictionalized versions of the traumas you’re surviving can be healing. I think that will be the case for a lot of people who read And What Can We Offer You Tonight. After the murders in Atlanta and this summer’s heat wave, a lot of readers are going to find catharsis in the story of a murdered sex worker who traverses a flooded city to kill her killer.

I think this novella will also appeal to a lot of readers who don’t typically like SFF. If Margaret Atwood can say The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t science fiction, then I think I’m justified in saying neither is And What Can We Offer You Tonight. Buy this book for your snobby aunt and tell her it’s Literature that happens to have some lightly futuristic technology and exactly one un-dead girl. 

Disclosure

I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

More Info

Publisher: Neon Hemlock Press
Hardback Page Count: 80

Premee Mohamed is delightful on Twitter and on her blog, so check those out.

Preorder the book on Amazon (out July 20).

Spoiler-Free Book Review: Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed

Published by J. Z. Kelley on October 21, 2020
Cover art for Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed
Apparently, there is a spoiler hidden in this cover.

Beneath the Rising is a beautiful, exciting, hilarious, devastating, breathtaking, intimate adventure novel about power and privilege, and about friendships that smother and sustain us. There are a lot of books “about power and privilege” coming out right now, but Rising isn’t about rich white people behaving badly—not really. It’s about surviving and maybe even fighting back against them.

There are really three main characters here—Johnny, the genius: rich, white, and exceptional in every way; Nick, the narrator: poor, brown, “ordinary,” and nearly invisible in her shadow; and their friendship. They have been each other’s best and only friends for so long that the relationship between them has not only gravity but also personality and will of its own.

At seventeen, Johnny has already cured AIDS and dementia, made strides towards ending hunger and houselessness, and solved the plastics crisis. She’s already changed the world, but her newest invention, a clean energy device with limitless capacity, is going to
make it unrecognizable. Assuming the eldritch Ancient Ones the device awakened don’t destroy it first. Johnny embarks on a globe trotting quest to find a way to stop them, and their friendship drags Nick along with her, even though they both know he’s powerless to help her.

I said it already, but Beneath the Rising is just gorgeous. It’s a vivid sensory experience full of heart and humor and odors so meticulously detailed they could almost be indie perfume descriptions. It starts slow and builds momentum in a way that cleverly mirrors Nick and Johnny’s friendship, so that by the halfway point, even when I knew I should put it down and try to get some weekend chores done, I just couldn’t.

One thing I loved about this take on Lovecraft’s mythos is that it isn’t a Wicked-style “What if the monsters were good?” retelling. The monsters are still incomprehensibly evil, but like a chiropractor, Premee Mohamed has aligned them the way they always should have been, not with the marginalized but with the powerful. AND she manages to sidestep the way that powerful magical villains often come off as cool and aspirational. The Ancient Ones are too inhuman and too rarely seen to try to emulate, and their human allies are invariably greedy, selfish, shortsighted, and kind of pathetic.

But mostly I loved Nick—hardworking, responsible, loyal Nick, who is (with one exception) never recognized for the great kid he is but goes on trying his best anyway, even though he doesn’t believe it will make any difference. He broke my heart. I love him so much. I want to double knot his shoes and make sure he remembers his lunch. I hope good things happen for him in the sequel, because he deserves so many good things.

More Info

Publisher: Solaris
Paperback Page Count: 416 pages
Audiobook Listening Length: 11 hours 24 minutes

Premee Mohamed is delightful on Twitter and on her blog, so check those out. Then you can get the book and support your local independent bookstore on Bookshop.org, or you can buy it on Amazon.