MY DEATH by Lisa Tuttle

By acornzenith

I read this pretty quick (like in a couple days), and I’m honestly not sure why people online were hyping it up so much. They kept calling it “uncanny,” “unpredictable,” “moving,” and “surprising,” but to me it mostly fell flat. It read really easily, I’ll give it that, but I was under a third of the way through before I could tell what the whole “and then I woke up” thing was going to be. I had the basic setup, even if I couldn’t see exactly how it would play out yet. What made me roll my eyes was this whole situation where the main character is suddenly asked to take other people sailing. The boat is there, she’s able to sail it all by herself, and there’s even a rubber dinghy on it. Fine. But she hasn’t looked at or thought about the boat in two years, and somehow the marina owner is just taking care of it the whole time, perfectly ready to go, even though nobody asked. I mean… in real life, getting anyone to maintain your boat the way you want is ridiculously hard. If you show up with zero notice and just ask, “Is my boat ready?” you’d get laughed out of the place. Hull, rigging, sails, all the deck stuff, lines, steering, electrics, motor, safety gear, bilge, fuel system—the list goes on. And yet she just swings by and they’re out on the water. Super convenient. There are also little “gotchas” that felt like they’d be more fun if they weren’t so obvious. Like the narrator brings up reading MRS DALLOWAY three times, and there’s a character named Clarissa (so… you know). Then there’s a photo of Clarissa’s mom meeting someone and it turns out to be Virginia Woolf, and the mom tried to kill herself by… jumping out a window. Same vibe as Septimus from MRS DALLOWAY. It’s not that I hate references, I just didn’t find them that rewarding. And the ending has some kind of awkward geographic/logistical thing going on too, but it’s basically ignored. Maybe it’s meant to feel mysterious or magical, but I have no idea. Overall, if they tightened it and made it way more focused, I think it’d work better as a short story. As a roughly 100-page novella, though, it left me kinda underwhelmed.