These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart

by

eBook, 110 pages

English language

Published April 13, 2024 by Tachyon Publications.

ISBN:
978-1-61696-413-9
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(2 reviews)

Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay is killed, everyone at the commune is suddenly a potential suspect. In the remains of Kansas City, which the government has all but abandoned, Dora knows there will be no justice unless she solves the murder herself.

But Kay’s death is only one of several shocking incidents. A strange new drug is circulating, people are disappearing, and a war between two nefarious corporations is looming. As Dora untangles a terrible conspiracy, she must also come face-to-face with assailants from her pre-transition past.

2 editions

reviewed These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Short, tense thriller

This is a tightly focussed that tells one story from one character's perspective, against a background of a much bigger collapse that doesn't really get discussed. I think that focus is one of its strengths, at the same time as I'd love to see the same story through the eyes of a couple of the other characters in it.

Wasserstein also uses the story as a vehicle for some trans parent trauma catharsis, by way of a character who is the sum of every bad parental reaction to a child coming out as trans. It also pokes a bit at the tensions between anarchist commune idealism and practice, and at the simple truth that one's clone would still be their own person. Which is a lot to pack in to a novella!

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reviewed These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Noir, but much more

I haven't read a lot of noir, probably because it's always seemed just a bit too cynical. 'These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart' translates noir into a dystopian near future with an anarchist commune and a trans MC, still feels like it has a lot of the key components of noir, but has so much more heart as it wrestles with what it is to be human, particularly a flawed one trying to find one's way in the world.