Tattoo (with Bonus Content)

June 6, 2011
Kasai returns to the fragile world of 2009's Ice Song, where somatics blend human and nonhuman characteristics into singular forms, and a tiny minority, the Traders, can transform from male to female and back again. Unfortunately for Trader Sorykah/Soryk, a Trader's personae are different people and existence is a zero-sum game; every moment Sorykah experiences is one that Soryk cannot, and vice versa. As the consequences of Queen Sidra's successful strike on Matuk the Collector, head of evil Tirai Industries, ripple across the world, Sorykah and Soryk contend for precious moments in time. In this odd mix of decadent futurism and secondary world fantasy where ancient myths coexist with mundane technology, the characters struggle to survive in a society stratified by economics and biology. As with Kasai's 2006 Flesh Hell (not linked to this series), Tattoo revels in the lushly erotic while remaining aware of the costs of addiction and self-indulgence.

June 1, 2011

Sequel to Kasai's Ice Song (2009), mystical science fiction set in a world dominated by rapacious, amoral Tirai Industries, where many humans—the somatics—have an admixture of animal genes.

Submarine engineer Sorykah Morigi, secretly a Trader—one who shifts unpredictably between separate female and male bodies and personalities—destroyed the evil Matuk, head of TI. Now Chen, Matuk's vicious son, invents and deploys new, cruelly addictive drugs. Sorykah's job was to take submarines beneath the Sigue, the southern ice continent, to drill for fossil water. Now, in a mystical twist, we learn that the gods were real and left descendants. One of them, Diabolo, slumbers inside a volcano beneath the Sigue; his venomous blood runs in the veins of "octameroons," half-squid, half-human creatures that live beneath the frigid sea, and that venom gives rise to the latest highly addictive drug which, when tattooed into the skin, gives rise to uncontrollable lust and sexual pleasure. Sorykah's male half, Soryk, has impregnated Queen Sidra, leader of the somatic resistance in the Erun Forest, and wants to stay with her even though Sidra knows that she will die giving birth. Soryk and Sorykah, with their wildly varying desires and motivations, get along no better than before. However, what with all the ice that's been abstracted by TI's submarines, Diabolo begins to awaken; the erupting volcano threatens to melt the ice and change the climate. Once again this is all intensely rendered, sexually charged and complicated by unpredictable gender switches.

A parable of our times? Perhaps. What's missing is a sense that anyone, including the author, knows where all this is headed.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2011
In her second novel, Kasai returns to her sharply original world of human-animal somatics, mad scientists, and forest strongholds to continue the saga of Sorykah Minuit, the gender-switching Trader, and her increasingly autonomous male alter ego, Soryk. Having saved her infant twins from the psychotic manupulations of the Collector, Sorykah is intent on wresting her life back from the chaos of the past few months. Unfortunately, the sinister predations of the corporation she works for, an insidious new form of tattoo, a looming environmental disaster, and her alters increasingly insistent emergence into the world conspire to force her toward a destiny she never planned. Kasais haunting imagery is as beautiful and precise as in her first novel, but the occasional forays into florid prose and undeveloped ideas have been minimized, leaving readers with a slicker, faster, and more suspenseful story. For uniqueness and style, Kasai is one to keep watching.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)