Sybil is brilliant and terrifies me.

i heart sybil lamb x ∞ shieldsread this book while train hopping across canada,she signed this dirty ole book of mine with a picture of us pissing off trains together lolz dirty ass lolz

This book was wild. The back-cover doesn't really give a good description of what this book is about, and there aren't as nearly many reviews and ratings on here as there should be, so I'll try based on my impressions: This isn't really a novel with a story arc. It's a series of rough-cut slices of life from a post-Katrina New Orleans, to the mountains of Tennessee, to the Toronto underground. I've Got a Time Bomb is like meeting someone at a party who randomly pulls out an outrageous anecdote l...

I wasn't expecting a book in stream of consciousness style to be so well structured. I had a hard time getting through the last 20%, but that's a mighty feat considering this thing is 350 pages. This book pushes the boundaries of trans lit in wonderful ways. It's not just that the main character is trans, but it's also that she's a punk dirtbag surviving in a climate change fueled dystopia of near future Amerika. It talks about being trans and being cis without using the terminology. You *feel*

I knew when I started reading this book that it was going to be crazy surreal fun. What I didn't know was how tragic and moving it was going to be. Totally brilliant and overwhelming.

This book was kind of exhausting. I'm pretty sure it is about 100 pages too long. At least too long for me. The first third of the book has charm, but after that it kind of just starts turning into a bit of a slog. I appreciate this story, and I like the characters/settings. There's just some things about this book that I feel hold it back.The narration of this book feels like if Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and A Clockwork Orange had a secret love child and that child really wanted to tell you s...

Intense, weird, grubby, violent, emotional, frustrated, extremely jittery. A cross-country adventure across a mid-apocalyptic United States ("Amerika") full of mostly-good sex, mostly-bad drugs and a rogue's gallery of odd and exhilerating characters. Loosely based on the author's own life experiences, the protagonist Sybil founds and co-runs a squatter commune in flood-ravaged New Orleans, crash-lands in isolated mountain farms, drives across salt wastes in a ice cream truck, and plunges into a...

Sybil Lamb is an absolute legend and her wild trans punk road novel is unlike anything you've ever read. Based on her experience of being ruthlessly beaten and sustaining brain damage after being left for dead on the train tracks, I've Got a Time Bomb blurs reality to create a marvelous genre all her own.

This book was hard to rate because it's so unique. I'm not a fan of either post-apocalyptic stuff or absurdism as a category, so it might be more like 3 stars for me personally, but I can recognize the coolness of it, and appreciate how unapologetically queer and trans it is. I think someone with a little more trauma honestly might find it more relatable. I do find the way it's both fictionalized North Ameri(k)a and not compelling, as you never quite can locate yourself as you go through the nar...

(Not Really) Post-Apocalyptic Explosive AdventureThis book has a wild, post-apocalyptic vibe at first. Kind of Mad Max-y. Except the setting is Post-Katrina, not post-apocalypse. The main character, Sybil, even spends time cruising around in a crazy modified ice cream truck, and there is gas thievery.The adventure follows Syb as she tumbles around through squats and whatnots, befriending or sort-of-almost connecting with various other adventurers, trying to connect or not trying to connect or fa...

This took me a long time to read, partly cos I've not been feeling very read-y these last few months but also because of the form, disjointed often drug-fuelled incidents narrated by a character I cared for a great deal but who also had brain damage and MH stuff so at times it was too familiar in some ways for me to deal with. Also there's a lot of trauma in the book, although much of it wasn't stuff that I've experienced as it's transmisogynistic violence.Anyway, I think this book is incredible...

This smart novel takes the eponymous Sybil on a surreal ride through post-Katrina Amerika. Dis-jointed, drug-fueled, hallucinatory, Sybil is time-bombing her readers from the first page to the last. ‘I’ve Got a Time Bomb,’ out of Topsider Press, is an achievement of storytelling.

What do I even tell you? So, full disclosure, I was involved in making this book exist. BUT I did this for free. I put in hundreds of hours of unpaid work, and I basically did this because the last time I liked a book this much was when I was twelve and read Middlemarch. I feel like Middlemarch was my first hit of literature, and I spent twenty years reading compulsively, searching for something that would exhilarate me like that again, and got pretty close but never quite there, until I read th...

One of the most unique books ever written.

The only way for me to begin a review of Ottawa-born Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb is by saying it’s the strangest, most unique book I’ve ever read, and I have no fucking clue how to review it. I think both Sybils (the author and main character share a name, among other similarities) would take this as a compliment, though, so here we go....Sybil is the anti-heroine that you learn to love: she’s a bisexual trans woman, she’s not above fucking you to get what she wants (you know, like m...

Okay what! Hahaha. I love this book. Sample: "Syb left the burbling gas can in the sand and stashed the other ones under a scrap of canvas to be dusted with the sand-plain winds. Then she wrapped a dampened bandanna over her mouth and set out to walk the few miles back into Salt Plain City. "By the time she arrived she had a saltsicle growing like a psychedelic bass player goatee on her chin. Every breath in the salt plains gives you 0.03% of your daily recommended intake of sodium. It was 10 a...

aaaaah!! sybil lamb is so, so, so perfect. like.. people you want to be, for real.this book is crazy. it's so refreshing to see a trans narrative that's a narrative instead of, like, a sad lgbtq archetype or something. and sybil - or should i say sterile? - just blows me away. the most striking scenes are perhaps either the incident itself or when sybil and a friend shoot up - estrogen. it took me a while to finish, maybe because of the somewhat cyclical nature of the narrative, but i'm really g...

I thought this was pretty great, the style is really interesting, hard to follow, hallucinatory, surreal and trippy which I always love. Very time and world bendy. I think the second half wasn't as good as the first, I get a little bored of long scenes about taking drugs and there were a few. I really enjoy the way she writes details about bodies and the ways the dialogue was written was the best part for me.

Reads like a messy autobiography by a rapist, which is what it is. If you’re transmasc, do not party with Lamb, do not be alone with Lamb. Dumbass book, dangerous author.

Daring hyper-surreal narrative describing a dystopian future america? a dystopian present america? a fucking wild ride alongside half dead, half alive, clever and confused protagonist anti-hero Sybil DeLye, as she scrounges for hormones, drugs, food and occasionally a change of clothes. Get a better understanding of american geography by seeing it through her brain-damaged eyes. read it. read this book.