My rating: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
I’ve read both books in Tiffany Pitts’s Thanatos Rising series, and I can honestly say that Pitts writes with a uniquely delightful literary voice. Her particular brand of contemporary sci-fi adventure somehow manages to present life-and-death situations alongside blithe imagination in a way that often seems to look askance at reality as if to say, “Really, reality? Really?”
I’m not sure if I’m making sense here, so to sum up my opinion more concisely: The second book in the series in the series, Wizzy Wig is a fun sci-fi read that’s certainly worth your time. Especially if you like cats. And strong characters of any gender. And reality-bending pizza.
Yeah, you read that right: reality-bending pizza. I won’t spoil the details, but this book is a tale of multiple realities and how a tiny hole between them wreaks havoc upon a small group of Seattle citizens, a nanotechnologically-augmented house cat, a sugar glider, and quite possibly one of the few point-of-view spider characters in fiction.
Pitts tells the story from multiple points of view, which is something of a necessity when dealing with characters able to force themselves into the bodies of their alternate-universe counterparts–or when entertaining us with the internal thought processes of a cat or a deadly (and puckish) Brazilian wandering spider. While the reality-warps in Wizzy Wig were a tad confusing for me to keep up with, the characters themselves were in the same boat, so my confusion was theirs, but I grasped it all in the end.
Wizzy Wig is a ridiculous book, and I say that in every complimentary sense of the word. Whether or not you’ve read the first book in the series, if you like light science fiction with a sense of humor, you’ll find something to enjoy here.
Also, pizza. 🙂
