Izzy Wasserstein: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (2024, Tachyon Publications)
English language
Published April 9, 2024 by Tachyon Publications.
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a vignette about working through guilt and self-loathing toward self-forgiveness.
There's a lot going on in terms of themes: gender, transhumanism, anarchy and fascism, cloning, all mixed into a more standard crime plot.
Although the main thread is satisfactorily wrapped up, there's definitely room to explore the world further - I want more Dora!
These Fragile Graces is a fun trans noir murder mystery novella. It's a story that focuses much more on interpersonal and community relations than it does on a well-plotted mystery or detailed worldbuilding. That focus also sums up my feelings about what I felt worked and didn't in the story.
Mostly, I wish the mystery plot was a little bit more cohesive, and that there was more detail about the state of the world itself rather than being in a vague near-future urban decay. I loved the small detail of having memory implants to deal with trauma-based dissociation from childhood, but I wish the ideas around implants/augments and a rejection syndrome connected more to the plot.
It is nice to see an anarchist commune in fiction (I feel like maybe I've only read this in Margaret Killjoy's work previously) and how the protagonist Dora wrestles with her relationship with the …
These Fragile Graces is a fun trans noir murder mystery novella. It's a story that focuses much more on interpersonal and community relations than it does on a well-plotted mystery or detailed worldbuilding. That focus also sums up my feelings about what I felt worked and didn't in the story.
Mostly, I wish the mystery plot was a little bit more cohesive, and that there was more detail about the state of the world itself rather than being in a vague near-future urban decay. I loved the small detail of having memory implants to deal with trauma-based dissociation from childhood, but I wish the ideas around implants/augments and a rejection syndrome connected more to the plot.
It is nice to see an anarchist commune in fiction (I feel like maybe I've only read this in Margaret Killjoy's work previously) and how the protagonist Dora wrestles with her relationship with the people in it, wishing she could keep them safe in ways that they don't want to be. And, the heart of this novel is a very trans story about how Dora deals with a (non-estrogenated) clone of herself who comes to murder her but she ultimately ends up protecting. From the moment her clone showed up and yelled traitor, I knew exactly where this story was going, but it was still satisfying to get there all the same.
