“This World Is Not Yours” Review

“This World Is Not Yours” by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

After fleeing her controlling and murderous family with her fiancée Vinh, Amara embarks on a colonization project, New Belaforme, along with her childhood friend, Jesse.

The planet, beautiful and lethal, produces the Gray, a “self-cleaning” mechanism that New Belaforme’s scientists are certain only attacks invasive organisms, consuming them. Humans have been careful to do nothing to call attention to themselves until a rival colony wakes the Gray.

As Amara, Vinh, and Jesse work to carve out a new life together, each is haunted by past betrayals that surface, expounded by the need to survive the rival colony and the planet itself.

There’s more than one way to be eaten alive.

Review

This was an interesting story. There wasn’t a lot of in-depth world building in this one but it mostly made sense since the colonists didn’t really understand the world they were on either and that was mostly the point. The writing style was interesting in that each chapter was a short scene in the character’s lives with time jumps of various lengths in between. Some of the chapters were no more than a page long and only contained the internal monologue of the characters. The characters themselves were not all that likable but I felt like it was the point given how toxic their relationships with each other were. The ending was a bit disturbing but I liked it.

Warnings and additional reviews are available on the StoryGraph page for “This World Is Not Yours”

Book Details

The cover of This World Is Not Yours depicts a person inside a spacesuit whose face is partially obscured in shadow and appears to be grinning manically. The rest of the cover is very dark with a lot of grays and green colors. The title is across the chest of the spacesuite with the author's name at the top.

Author’s Website
Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Publisher / Date
Tor Nightfire, September 2024
Genre
Science Fiction, Horror
Page Count
166
Completion Date
October 29, 2024

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