Sip Hardcover – August 29, 2017

While this plot had some potential, which is why I bought it, it turned out to be medium to short spurts of poetic rambling or egregious violence. It wasn't really clear why that first person thought it would be a good idea to "sip" his shadow, or how that works, exactly. But it seems to have left all the uneducated, mentally unstable people outside the walled areas, except for the "heroine." I rarely don't finish a book, but I was sorely tempted with this one. I did finish it, but now that I have, I'm mostly just glad it's over.

Sip is a haunting and thought-provoking novel. It takes place in a future world of addiction, where people drink shadows to maintain a steady high. Any animated life-form's shadow can produce the desired effect, provided that the light source is the natural sun. What is a shadow? Is it simply the absence of light? Can a shadow be stolen? The nature of absence is a key point in this story. Some people live sheltered from the effects of sunlight in domes, avoiding the influence of shadow. The rest of the world lives wild, either hunting down shadows or dealing with the loss of their own dark reflections. Vigilantes have learned to hide their own shadows, while another survivor can make her own appear and disappear at will. Belief systems are strong in this world, where the immanent appearance of Halley's Comet is meant to change everything.The vignettes and characters that make up this book are resonant, drawing the reader in with their immediacy. Brian Allen Carr weaves a tapestry of fine language, utilizing words that are crafted with so much substance that you can feel their contours. Their shadows are etched in my memory.

Brian Allen Carr is like the Cormac McCarthy of weird fiction. His prose is literary as hell, even when he’s writing about the most fantastic things you’ve ever heard of. It never reads as pretentious or flowery for the sake of flowery. This is a guy who wrote a book that’s basically Sharknado in the Old West, slapped the MF-word in the title, and it still comes off as real, honest-to-goodness literature. Sip is his first book from a major publisher. It’s every bit as fun and well-written as his small press stuff.The setting of Sip might classify it as a Space Western. It’s a dystopian future; everything has turned to crap, and high technology has been lost. They’ve got guns and trains, and one DIY machine that keeps severed limbs alive to milk shadows from. You see, what separates this from other Space Westerns is how we got to this F’ed-up future: people have learned you can get super high huffing shadows, and society falls as a result of this addictive scourge.Sip’s got a big, diverse and well-painted cast, and a bunch of subplots. It’s Carr’s most ambitious effort yet, and succeeds on every level. This is easily one of the best books of the year. I listened to the Audible version, and the narrator did a great job bringing the characters and the story to life.

I was drawn in by the premise but the whole thing was too grim and pointless-seeming to me - I mean, it is a post-apocalyptic nightmare, but still... None of the things that happened seemed to have reason for them, just pointless cruelty and bits of friendship, and the one solution to one problem being just a shift in thinking? No. The only reason I gave this book two stars instead of one is it did have poetic language.

Carr is at the top of his game with this one. There's family drama, but it's the kind where a daughter must rob the shadows of woodland creatures to feed the darkness to her mother so she can sleep. There's a kind of broken hope and half-hearted optimism in Murk, a peg-legged shadow junkie with a tender soul behind black eyes. There's an exiled tower guard, childishly curious to find the truth about the broken world outside his sheltered, follow-the-rules-with-no-questions upbringing. And it all flows like hallucinatory drugs that have been dumped in a rushing stream. One of the best books of the year... of the decade... of all-time.

I couldn’t find myself interested in this story. I didn’t finish it although I gave it a try to almost half.

People drinking their own shadows? And getting addicted to it? And stealing other people's shadows? If you like bizarre takes on fantasy, sci-fi, and/or dystopia, all coupled with some seriously unputdownable writing, then you'll enjoy this one. I can't wait to see what Carr does with the rest of his writing career. If he can come up with something this engaging and mind-blowing for his first novel, he's going to be a writer worth watching.

It is a rant. Just a messed up bunch of grotesque stories. Shock value aside, the story is weak and disconnected. I expected from the reviews that it would get better, but it never did. There are so many good books out there don't waste your time with this one.