This is copy 38 of 100 signed numbered copies.

This book was a hot mess. I suppose there's some fancy scifi-slash-pyschological reason why Jenna and Christy's stories were exactly the same, or why we got pages and pages of Jenna explaining how she made gloves instead of any resolution of these four desperately boring, disparate storylines, but I can't grasp it. Allan never explains why smartdogs were smartdogs, and not smartrats or any other animal, in the same way she doesn't explain why this futuristic greyhound racing needs human 'runners...

3.5 starsUneven (the entire first section fell flat for me-I almost set the book aside for good when endless descriptions of racing gauntlets began to overshadow the plot) but with enough intriguing ideas and imagery to make it worth reading as a whole. Curiously, since Allan has identified herself as a science-fiction/fantasy writer, I find her most effective when she's writing straight-forward literary fiction, as in the second and third chapters of this book. Perhaps the necessity of setting

Ambitious, beautifully written fantasy with multiple vignettes from related alternate universes, some more interesting than others. The opening chapter is outstanding.

Misclassified and mis-marketed, I nevertheless had a grand time reading this novel, sort of despite myself. Since the cover and blurb are not only poor but misleading, here's a thumbnail. This is a mostly plotless collections of stories about siblings, missing parents, language and its limitations as a form of communication. Roughly half of the stories are works of speculative fiction by a character (Christy) in the other half, a sort of parallel world to ours where there are CDs and genetic eng...

Feh. Not as advertised. Cover quotes Alastair Reynolds saying it's a "superbly strange SF novel." A quarter of the way through, we're in a dysfunctional part of England in a near-future version of our world. "Smartdogs" are being created, with empathic human handlers. Mildly interesting concept, legitimate SF, and we wonder where it is going. Change gears. 127 pages in a world that is for all practical purposes real-today, about ordinary people growing up unhappy and not getting along very well...

I normally don't review books I didn't finish, but sometimes a book bothers me enough that I just have to say something despite not finishing it. And I fully believe that the review of someone who didn't finish a book can be just as valid as the review of someone who completed it -- sometimes knowing why someone coudn't finish a book can still help a potential reader make the decision on whether or not to pick it up themselves. I want to make it clear, however, that I'm ONLY reviewing the portio...

What’s It AboutThe back cover copy of The Race would lead you to believe that the entire novel is set on the coastal town of Sapphire, suffering a slow decline from fracking and ecological disaster. And while that’s partly true, Sapphire and its denizens only comprise a fourth of the novel. In actual fact The Race consists of four novellas that are linked in an unexpected way.Should I Read It?Yes. Absolutely.This is a remarkable début novel on a number of levels. For one there’s the gorgeous, me...

My next installment in the Women's Book March challenge is The Race, by Nina Allan.I have mixed feelings about this one. I've had The Race on my to-read list for a while, in part because it was praised by one of my favorite sci-fi authors, Alastair Reynolds, who called it "a gorgeously and superbly strange SF novel". Another blurb promised a blend of "English country novel and hard science fiction", which is a pretty intriguing mashup.The first section of the book starts strong, delivering a sto...

I have no idea what this was about.

Occasionally, when I'm reading something I really love, I experience this feeling that is difficult to quantify in words. It's as though pieces of the past, encapsulating the pure undiluted pleasure of reading as a child, come back to me not as memories, but as full and tangible moments. I think it's probably the closest it's possible to get to time-travelling. The Race had this effect on me several times.It opens with the story of Jenna, who lives in an English coastal town named Sapphire. The

Originally published at Risingshadow.The Race is Nina Allan's debut novel. It's a rewarding, thought-provoking and beautifully written novel about four damaged people, brothers and sisters, everyday life, ecological collapse, smart dog racing and two different realities that merge and twist in a compelling way.Because Nina Allan has written beautiful short stories and novellas, I was eager to read her debut novel. In my opinion she has succeeded perfectly in writing a beautiful and immersive nov...

The Race wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I was drawn to the idea of the smartdog racing against a backdrop of a Britain damaged by fracking. Honestly, the fracking part is of no consequence, and I can understand why some readers were disappointed, but this book actually turned out to be something quite clever instead.There are five stories, and to some they might seem disjointed, but the connections are there. In fact all the things I felt weren’t that great in Jenna’s story, which comes firs...

Familiar territory for Nina Allan. Another book dealing with a kidnapping, or missing woman. This one had a stronger feminist slant than The Rift, and I felt that the male characters were too two-dimensional, even by the standards of that agenda. The first segment of the book, dealing heavily with the enhanced dog races, was the most interesting to me. The other several sections dealt with troubled characters whose lives intersected tangentially, while touching on world building elements. It was...

Ahoy there me mateys! So back in 2015 I was mesmerized by the John W. Campbell award finalists and was determined to read them all. Why that year versus any other year? I have no idea. But since that time me determination has not waivered. Getting copies of the novels and the time to read them were more of the problem. This novel marks me finally making it to the half-way point.This novel is a hard one to categorize. The story is written in four parts with each part portraying a different perspe...

A series of vignettes intertwined by slightly familiar details from previous chapters, bookended by the more SFnal of the works. Calls to question the ideas of reality and SF, character perspective, origination of fictional detail. Heavily literary, much to play with here.Even better as a reread.

I see from the other reviews that readers are deeply divided on the merits of this book. I happen to agree with several of them that this book's cover copy is deeply misleading, but I happen to think that Nina Allan herself didn't quite know what her book was about. There are some interesting conversations emerging here about family and such, but the pacing and plotting were a terrible mess, and the characters lacked distinctive voices. I found myself bored about a third of the way through, and

What can I say about this book? I loved it. I loved every page of it, and I'm not sure what I think now that I'm done, except that it was an entire experience, that I would love to discuss it and that its layers are so complex I almost want to re-read it immediately, so as to discern what I must have missed on the first read. Allan is exquisitely talented and thought-provoking. There were small fragments and sentences I didn't love, but the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.A novel obs...

Such a strange book. I loved the whales.

I feel a little bit misled by this one. It was perfectly well written and interesting, but the blurb promised SF and greyhounds, two of my absolute favourite things. The book is structured almost as four novellas, and two of the novellas are not SF at all. In fact, most of the book was not SF and it only featured holistic amounts of greyhounds, hence the low rating.If someone wants to write a near-future SF that actually focuses on enhanced greyhounds, then I would buy that like a shot. But this...