I’ve been a fan of Ken Liu for quite sometime now and I went into this book with high expectations. It’s touted as a genre-bending collection of short stories which only piqued my interest more.

The Hidden Girl… is primarily science fiction/fantasy but with a healthy dose of spillage from other genres too. There’s silkpunk, but there’s also old Chinese folklore and poetic short stories about retaining identity in a chaotic, dystopian world.

This book was going really strong until the last few stories became a blur. This was where fantasy stories came in, after a string of sci-fi ones about consciousness and identity. I’ve never been able to like fantasy as much as I like sci-fi and these stories were very difficult to read (and re-read because the words just weren’t piercing my brain).

But overall, this is a solid collection I’ll definitely be re-reading!