Tricia Sullivan's Occupy Me was very much to my liking, because it's something different, clever and entertaining. It's a fresh and ambitious blend of science fiction, fantasy and mystery fiction with thriller elements. It instantly sinks its hooks into the reader due to its compellingly weird and unusual story that doesn't follow the typical, easy route. It's a challenging and rewarding reading experience for those who want to invest a bit of time into reading a complex and gradually unfolding story that has surreal elements.

Occupy Me was a nice surprise for me, because it's unlike anything I've read recently. It's a genre-bending masterpiece that is guaranteed to thrill readers who love challenging and original fiction. When I read this novel, I thought to myself that there's something about it that is slightly reminiscent of novels written by Douglas Adams, because the story is a bit strange and mind-boggling in the vein of his fiction.

This novel tells of Pearl, an angel, who works for the Resistance, which is a mysterious organisation. When she is on a flight from New York to London, she recognises one of the passengers as the man who stole something from her and caused her to come to Earth. Pearl confronts the man and tries to grab his briefcase, but things go badly wrong and the briefcase goes through the ceiling of the plane. Next Pearl and the man tumble over the roof of the plane and go over the side. Soon Pearl witnesses something immensely peculiar...

I won't write more about the story in this review, because I might end up revealing too much information about the plot twists. I'll only mention that the story is layered, unique and challenges the reader's perception of reality.

The author tells her story through the characters of Pearl, Dr Sorle, Alison and Marquita, and she uses different narrative modes to enhance the story.

Pearl is a fascinating protagonist, because she's an angel and a lesbian. She arrived mysteriously on Earth, because she was hijacked and the first thing she remembers is being trapped inside a refrigerator in a junkyard. Her hijacker has taken something from her - HD launcher - and she wants it back. She comes from a place she calls HD, the Higher Dimensions.

Dr Sorle is a physician whose body is occupied by another man who does ugly things. The other man can come into his body and control him. When his body is under the control of the other man, he can sense things that are being done, but can't do anything to affect what is going on; he just has to witness what happens.

Alison is a veterinarian who lives in Edinburgh, and Marquita is a woman who is responsible for Pearl joining the Resistance.

It's possible that the story may seem a bit confusing at first, but when you give it time and let it unfold at its own pace, you'll find yourself rewarded with entertaining, exciting and intelligent events. The story is a bit like a puzzle and the reader has to put all the pieces together to make sense of the happenings. The story requires almost undivided attention and concentration from its reader, because it has not been written for hasty readers who want instant gratification or an easy read.

What makes this novel especially fascinating is the author's way of infusing the story with such ideas, themes and issues as corruption, entropy, causality and higher dimensions. The author refers well to these things and allows her readers to think about them during the story.

One of the best things about this novel is that the story is sufficiently strange and surreal to please readers who enjoy reading mind-blowing fiction. Because I enjoy surreal elements and love well written surreal fiction that doesn't offer easy answers to readers, I was deeply fascinated by the story and its plot twists.

Before I end this review, I want to mention that this is the first novel I've read by Tricia Sullivan. Because I enjoyed the story very much and found it compelling, I look forward to exploring what the author's other novels are like.

Tricia Sullivan's Occupy Me is a charmingly original and weird speculative fiction novel. I can recommend it to readers who are looking for something new to read, because it's an amazing reading experience. If you're in need of compelling and original fiction that differs from the norm, you can't go wrong by picking up this novel, because it's a fascinatinly wild ride.

My final words are:

This novel is original and highly enjoyable speculative fiction!

Review first posted at Girl Who Reads. A free copy was provided in exchange for an honest review.

Pearl is an angel working to make the world a better place as part of the Resistance. She does small acts of kindness, but when stressed will develop wings and display amounts of energy capable of changing reality. She is now out to save the world in a bigger way, by tracking down a killer with a briefcase containing a hole in the universe.

The story starts out with the second person point of view, a person getting hijacked by another entity. This is how we meet Pearl, and enter her point of view. Because it starts out in the middle of the action, there's no background into what the Resistance is, what HD is, why they have to act in small ways and not the large and overt ways that Pearl is capable of. We don't even find out that her supervisor of sorts Marquita is also her girlfriend until a quarter of the way through the novel. It's nice that Pearl is described as a "fifty-something woman of indeterminate not-European ancestry," though I would have liked it better if it didn't take a quarter of the book to find out anything about her. I understand that we're meant to pick up clues along the way and figure out the plot along with Pearl, but this feels almost too confusing.

There's a lot of action throughout the novel and Pearl is an approachable protagonist. I definitely mirror her confusion as she moves through the novel to try to find the briefcase and find out how it ties to the past she doesn't remember. I enjoy the visuals as she travels the world and meets various people throughout this novel. The language involved is beautiful and lyrical, but actual means of relating the story was difficult for me to really get into. About halfway through it was starting to make more sense for me, and once it clicked, the pacing also really picked up and catapulted forward. There is a lot of sci-fi and time travel elements throughout this, and the nature of the plot is why it was so convoluted initially.

This is definitely a story that would require multiple readings to fully understand the nuance in it, but I do think it's worth the effort.

Did not finish book.

WOW! Amazing writing, beautiful sentences waiting to be read out loud & shared. Great storytelling. Love this book! Incredibly imaginative flight of fancy.

I thought this book was going to be one I could not finish, but I persisted in the hope I might begin to enjoy it more. For me, this is one of those novels that had huge potential to be fantastic but the execution let it down badly. I found reading this book hurt my brain and that's not what you want when reading a book for pleasure.

The plot felt very disjointed and I struggled for a lot of the book to have a clear grasp on what was really going on, in addition to that the characters all seemed so much out of reach, I could not connect with any of them. It had moments where it would really shine, then it would just slide again and I was confused and finding it too much hard work. Darn shame as I really liked the sound of the plot. I think this book needed more simplicity, maybe too much was going on. I don't know. It just did not float my boat.

A woman with wings that exist in another dimension. A man trapped in his own body by a killer. A briefcase that is a door to hell. A conspiracy that reaches beyond our world. Breathtaking SF from a Clarke Award-winning author.

Tricia Sullivan has written an extraordinary, genre defining novel that begins with the mystery of a woman who barely knows herself and ends with a discovery that transcends space and time. On the way we follow our heroine as she attempts to track down a killer in the body of another man, and the man who has been taken over, his will trapped inside the mind of the being that has taken him over.

And at the centre of it all a briefcase that contains countless possible realities.

One of the things that really stood out for me is that I got no sense that the main winged female character was even female! I got more of a masculine sense from the way it was written and I wonder what readers would think if they were not told she was female. I found that a bit weird.

Too much going on here and sadly only 3 stars from me, to be honest I nearly gave it 2 stars as I did not like it but bumped it up for some of the better moments in the book. I have no idea if others will like, love or dislike this book. It might be a mixed bag.

Thanks to Orion Publishing Group for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Writer Tricia Sullivan has written tons of stuff, and now I need to read it all. Occupy Me is the first in a new series, and it is at times brutal, at other times uplifting. It's an action movie in book form. It moves quickly, and creates a complex world that needs saving. The female hero is enigmatic even to herself. Right there, because of her, you'll need to read this book. More than just that, Sullivan clearly is saving up for the next chapter in the series. But this one hit me right in the emotions. I need more of this, right now.

A brilliantly mind-warping, fast-paced science fiction thriller starring, among others, a powerful angel, a fifty-ish Scottish veterinarian who also does cross-stitch, a massive carnivorous quetzlcoatlus, a briefcase containing other dimensions, and a doctor whose timeline has been split by blood and oil. It's all so gripping and so much FUN - and so funny, too, at times! - that I couldn't stop reading. It's not my usual kind of read, but I loved it.

Synopsis: An “angel”, of indeterminate origin and purpose, is trapped on Earth, and they try to help achieve positive outcomes for human beings while endeavoring to find a way back “home”.

What I thought: This novel opens in media res, and it’s one of those books that leaves a lot unexplained, and the reader has to figure out the background from the clues given as events progress. The main character is one for whom the reader can feel empathy, and there is some intriguing worldbuilding and plotting here.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I actually did. It would probably benefit from a second reading, but that’s not in the cards for me right now, given everything else on my reading list for Hugo Nominations. If there's a sequel, I will probably do a re-read, then pick up the second one, because there's enough here that's unique and interesting to make it worth another go.

If the synopsis appeals to you, I encourage you to give this book a try.

This is a book that revels in its showing and keeps the telling to a minimum. Sullivan drops you in the middle of her world and expects you to keep up. It’s a book that requires concentration; I often reread earlier parts of the book to bring myself back up to speed after putting it down. But it’s also one of the most exciting and imaginative stories I have read since Nnedi Okorafor’s 'The Book of Phoenix'.

Scanning some of the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, it seems that readers either really liked this book or found it too confusing. I really enjoyed the ride because as well as it being at times exciting, mind-blowing, funny and intelligent, it made me think and ask questions about what I had just read. There is a refreshing lack of info-dump. Plus, there are some beautiful passages of prose in here. For example:

“The clouds over Viana do Castelo were dense and shapely; I could feel them muffling the town, pressing the sea smooth while light wandered sidelong into the sky.” (p.38)

“The woods gather round you like a winter coat. (p.53)

“They have woven this place from the wreckage of metal structure, from the scrambled desiccation of life forms reduced to dust and rime. From silicon and gold.” (p.110)

“I headed east, away from the searchlights, and then I saw it. Over the railway bridge the ancient animal glided black and lunar, like a cracked piece of sky.” (p.140)

The non-profit literary magazine Upcoming 4.Me concluded “It's completely bonkers, incredibly brave and well worth exploring at ease.” I’m a big fan of the word “bonkers” and find this to be a nice summary of the book. If you are lacking a bit of bonkers-ness in your SF reading life, then I recommend giving 'Occupy Me' a try. It might just blow your mind, in a good way.

Pearl is an angel, a being with wings that only exist in another dimension. She works for the Resistance–a mysterious organisation that promotes the spread of kindness among humans. As she returns from one of her missions, she recognises a passenger: he’s the man who stranded her here, away from her home. Dr. Sorle, meanwhile, has another problem: he has a passenger, one who regularly hijacks his body, and now, under the influence of that invisible rider, he’s stolen a briefcase that may or may not contain universes–and the soul of a dead man…

Occupy Me is a densely packed SF novel, brimming with ideas about past, future, the meaning of the self, and a cornucopia of universe nested like Russian dolls. That it manages to make all of this work while remaining rooted in its (mainly) 21st-Century setting is testament to Sullivan’s powerful writing. It’s not a book you pick for light reading, but if you’re ready to invest in something that will blow your mind and challenge your perceptions of the real, this is exactly the thing.

I'm halfway through this fine SF novel and recommend it. However the text of the Kindle version displays as grey rather than black on my Paperwhite which makes it irritatingly awkward to read. Apart from the chapter headings, which are black. Hopefully this will be fixed in an update.

Once upon a time I thought sci-fi was a genre everyone could enjoy if they so desired. Sorry to say but it's moved into a specialist role where it's only suitable for nerds and geeks (and people like myself who will read sci-fi till the end of the world, regardless).

Fortunately there is still one author out there who's writing sci-fi the masses can enjoy (but it would be unreasonable to mention his name here)

A brilliantly mind-warping, fast-paced science fiction thriller starring, among others, a powerful angel, a fifty-ish Scottish veterinarian who also does cross-stitch, a massive carnivorous quetzlcoatlus, a briefcase containing other dimensions, and a doctor whose timeline has been split by blood and oil. It's all so gripping and so much FUN - and so funny, too, at times! - that I couldn't stop reading. It's not my usual kind of read, but I loved it.