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Tell Me I'm Worthless is a gritty horror story that kind of devolves into a disturbing stream of consciousness while simultaneously being an analysis of the persistence of populist fascism in England. It follows Alice and Ila, two friends+ living through the fallout of surviving a shared traumatic event. There's a lot going on here.

content warnings: rape, explicit and severe transphobia, literal Nazi themes/imagery, extreme violence

Natürlich überspitzt, aber definitiv zum Denken anregend. Mit vielen der genannten Vorurteile sehe ich mich selbst heute noch immer wieder konfrontiert. Ein paar positive Beispiele hätten aber sicher nicht geschadet.

This book has a number of flaws but it does one thing well - the author is very inventive in creating a zoo of fantastic/magical animals. Those passages describing the animals, their behaviour and their enclosures are the best part of the book. She also seems to be rather knowledgable about the work behind the scenes of a zoo. If you're in any part critical of zoos, though, this book would be very frustrating. The only criticism is only presented once and is rather superficial. I appreciate the effort of the author to make the protagonist someone with anxiety but unfortunately, she comes off as rather annoying and also immature for someone her age for about half of the book. There thankfully is some character growth eventually. The pace picks up at around the halfway mark and while the mystery turns out to be somewhat predictable in the end, I enjoyed the book overall. Objectively, it only merits 3 stars but it felt more like 4, so I'll settle at 3.5.

I really like the way that Interference takes the themes from its predecessor and extends them in different directions, without just being like "and this is the next thing that happened to all the same characters".

I particularly enjoyed the way she wove in the contingent from Earth - it reminded me strongly of the later books in the Planetfall series.

New humans, new life forms, new explorations - it builds a great new story on the foundation laid in Semiosis.

I loved the setting of this book - at a fancy party in a ballroom in ever stranger worlds. The world building was very inventive with the various Echos, the more or less evil supernatural beings, the guilds and the quirky teashop. Perhaps, the author could have gone into more depth here and there. The main story is a sort of detective mystery with a dash of romance. I appreciated how the main character is a new mother and how that's handled. There are a few minor things that keep it from being 5 stars but I found it a thoroughly entertaining read.

Someone wrote, the book reminded them of Star Trek, in a good way. And yeah, I get it now! I guess book 2 has to be different (won't spoiler, but book 1 brings... closure) - but will definitely check it out.