Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie RobsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fresh and interesting premise, which always catches my attention. Lydia works as a translator for an alien cultural attaché. His people are telepathic, with no spoken language, and translating for them gradually makes humans drunk (or drunkesque; it's not exactly drunkenness, but very similar). This causes some behavioural problems in public places, but people mostly just deal with it.
From there, it becomes a highly unusual murder mystery with some fascinating aspects. (view spoiler) There are red herrings in all directions, there's danger, Lydia gets to use her unusual ability to drive a car manually, and the mystery keeps heading in one direction and then turning into something else quite unexpected. I did find the final resolution a bit of an anticlimax after all the running around, but it didn't sour me on the book.
The writing style is what I refer to as "British breathless"; it's along these lines (not a real quotation): "Yeah that's not going to happen Lydia, it's clear the cops suspect you." More technically correct would be: "Yeah, that's not going to happen, Lydia. It's clear the cops suspect you." In this case, though, it reads more as authentic voice than incompetent writing (and, since I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, it may be different in the published version).
As a matter of personal taste, I am not a fan of alienated, emotionally distant protagonists in a crumbling near-future, but I have a paradoxical love of cyberpunk, and while I still didn't enjoy those aspects, I was able to enjoy the book despite them. It's not full-on cyberpunk in the sense of being in VR (particularly as Lydia is unable to use VR rigs for long without nausea; it's a minor plot point), but the feel is cyberpunkish.
The social media in this book does feel quite contemporary rather than futuristic (except that each post has a "truthiness rating" added by an algorithm; this is also a plot point). That struck me as a slight weakness in the worldbuilding, but it wasn't a major for me. I also wondered why the embassy was in New York. For the cultural attaché to be based in NY made sense, but ambassadors are based in capitals; important non-capital cities get consulates.
Except for a couple of small issues, though, this was a strong and engaging book, with a fresh concept well explored.
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