Read time: 5 minutes
🎧 Listened in audio 📢 Narrated by Major Curda and Michelle H. Lee
⏱ Duration: 13 hours Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy
Read as part of the Goodreads Reading Challenge — Summer Encore
🏷️ Publisher: Tor Books / Macmillan Audio
Book Blurb:
The border cuts you in two. When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country, the other stays trapped at home. Some instances stay close, talking daily, trying to keep their lives in sync so they can eventually reintegrate into one person again. Others walk away from each other completely, the way Soyoung Rose Kang did when she left Korea at ten years old.
Rose, now in America, never planned on going back. Then her grandfather died, and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral. What Rose doesn’t know is that Soyoung isn’t just calling her home. She’s planning to steal her body and her life. Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, and betrayal collide against the harsh permanence of the border, in a debut that asks exactly how far you’d go to live the life you didn’t choose.
Let’s talk about the book:
Sublimation really took me on a ride. The concept that you can have separate instances of your life living at the same time, well, isn’t that what sci-fi is all about? Isabel J. Kim knocks it out of the park with the concept.
Major Curda and Michelle H. Lee do a beautiful dance with the narration. I enjoyed having four different characters narrated by just these two, and at some points, all of them were talking at the same time. It was simply brilliant. The technology, the government interference, the security risk, the H-1B visa issues, all of it was very well narrated.
I started this as part of the Goodreads Reading Challenge Summer Encore, and I’m glad I got to know this book.
The climax, though. It definitely could have been tighter. The last few chapters went a little off-kilter. The entire first twelve hours of the book was deeply engaging, but that last hour did not live up to the expectations the rest of the story had built. I ended the book not very happy with the explanations. I liked the direction it ended in, don’t get me wrong, but it could have been slightly more engaging. It felt loosely wrapped up.
Would I recommend it?
If you love a sci-fi concept that actually commits to its own logic, Sublimation delivers that in spades. The idea of living as two separate instances of yourself, one abroad and one left behind, is handled with real intelligence, and the audiobook narration makes the multi-character chaos genuinely fun to follow. Where it stumbles is the finish. Twelve hours of tight, engaging storytelling gives way to a last hour that rushes its own answers. I still recommend it, especially in audio, but go in knowing the ending won’t quite match the build-up.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
If You Loved Sublimation, Try These Next
- The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson — If Sublimation’s idea of a self split across two lives got under your skin, this one takes it further: Cara can only travel to parallel worlds where her doppelgänger is already dead, and she’s died on nearly all of them. Same questions about privilege, belonging, and which version of you gets to survive.
Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy - Severance by Ling Ma — This is the book the Sublimation blurb itself points to, and for good reason. It’s a quieter, stranger take on immigration, work, and identity wrapped in end-of-the-world satire, following a Chinese American office worker who keeps showing up to her job long after everyone else has stopped.
Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy - Version Control by Dexter Palmer — For the reader who wanted more time to sit with Sublimation’s “what if there were two of me” premise, this one turns a time-machine device into a meditation on identity, memory, and how much of who we are is really just data. Slower burn, same big questions.
Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy - The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He — Swap the border for an ocean and you’ve got two sisters separated with no memory of how, each trying to find her way back to the other. It has that same slow reveal of what technology and identity really cost the people caught in between.
Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy - Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang — A different kind of border story: a group of young Martians sent to live on Earth come home changed, caught between two worlds and unable to fully belong to either. If the immigration and government-interference threads in Sublimation stuck with you, this digs into that same in-between space.
Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
What Would You Sacrifice?
Would you keep your instance close, or walk away and never look back? Let me know in the comments how you’d handle the version of yourself left behind.
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Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
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