I received a gifted copy of BIOSHIFTER: VOLUME ONE by Natalie Maher from the author for the purpose of reviewing it for #SPFBO9 for the team created by @coverswithcassidy.
BIOSHIFTER follows Hannah, a teen who attends high school by day and streams video games on Twitch by night. For a long while she has been experiencing strange dreams where she doesn’t quite feel like herself and the world doesn’t feel like her own and she’s constantly digging and digging. When she finally breaks through the end of the tunnel one night she finds herself in a strange spider like body in an entirely different fantasy world. She slowly begins to learn the lore and the different races of people of this fantastical place while also learning to navigate in an entirely foreign self.
When Hannah goes to sleep in the fantasy world, she wakes back in her bed back at home, but it isn’t quite business as usual. Hannah’s human body is beginning to transform in weird and horrifying ways as her two selves and worlds begin to experience blurred lines.
I was instantly intrigued by the cover of this book (it is a fantastic cover!) and the premise of a main character living in two worlds which begin to bleed into each other. I think that the body horror aspects of the real world setting as Hannah’s body starts to transform was the biggest strength of the story. Go in expecting blood and weirdness as Hannah transforms both physically and mentally!
We are following the entire story in Hannah’s head. The overall narrative is quite conversational as Hannah observes herself, all that is around her, and questions everything she’s seeing and doing. This sort of chatty narrative isn’t my favorite style but it did sound like a worried teen so I think it made sense for the character.
I think another strength of this book is that Hannah’s anxiety feeling really comes off the page. Even before all of this starts, Hannah has been dealing with a lot of anxiety. She is a lesbian living in a religious family and conservative community and she feels that she must keep this a secret. She draws a lot of parallels between keeping her true self secret and trying to keep her physical transformation under wraps. There are a lot of good discussions on the fears she has and homophobia in the world in general which certainly feel relevant.
The story does tend to be overly detailed, especially in the real world setting. We spend a lot of time following Hannah moment by moment in slice of life type passages from Hannah’s life. I think this was in part an issue of trying to cover too much with Hannah’s various fantasy and gaming interests, her job, her friends, her romantic interests, school, Covid, etc. There was quite a bit about Pokémon and other games which aren’t things that really held attention for me.
Of the two worlds, I was much more interested in following along with Hannah’s story in the fantasy world. As she meets people and finds a way to communicate with them (Hannah’s other self doesn’t have the ability to speak out loud) she gets to ask a lot of questions about the world and the magic. This does result in some infodump conversations, but given Hannah’s foreign existence in that world, it makes sense that these conversations would take place.
The world included interesting lore, especially as Hannah and her companions begin to explore more. There are a lot of different types of magic and ways they interact and that sometimes was a little hard to keep straight in my mind, but I found the ideas quite interesting. I really liked that Hannah did spend time questioning what she was told by the people in that world. Instead of immediately believing chaos magic meant the wielder was an enemy, she did put some time into thinking whether that was information to be trusted.
In terms of the story arc overall, this felt unfinished for me. My understanding is that this was originally a serialized story published online and this is very clearly labeled as the first volume. While there is progression to the story, I wouldn’t say that this really wraps up to a conclusion. I expect some things to be open ended when it comes to the first book in a series, but I would generally prefer to have the ending feel a little more wrapped up. There were some twists at the end that could make more of an impact going forward, but they felt a bit quick and out of the blue.
Overall there were some interesting elements that worked well for me, but I think the book as a whole could be tightened up.
DG Reads 