A review by yeehaw_agenda
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller

3.0

If this book had ended halfway through I would have given it 5 stars! The worldbuilding is exquisite and I wanted a deep dive into Qaanaaq and its consequences. And Miller seemed to be building to that and doing it in ways that enthralled me. But then it all suddenly took a left turn into a contrived fantastical family drama that felt shoehorned into the science fiction techno-capitalist allegory it had been doing so well at. The book tried to do too much and ended up failing on almost all fronts. The characters were poorly developed, the connections between them tenuous, the plot points about nanobonding were lazy, and the best parts of the book got laid to waste for reasons I cannot understand. And it is absolutely chock full of ableism and potentially statutory rape.