Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio for Readers' Favorite

Q. Turner crafts a spellbinding dystopian world in Blood Sacrifice, where the walled Empire of Isulum is a pressure cooker of addiction, caste, and artificial life. It opens with Rita Shor, an impoverished, grieving Ishti woman who lost her children to a pandemic. After years of abuse, she kills her husband in what she describes as self-defense. Imprisoned for murder, she becomes “Iota,” a prophetic voice in the metaverse, delivering sermons that spark a movement. Soon, others start orbiting around her, including a doctor whose demagogue-like preaching arouses the anger of young men online, a disgraced heiress who reports for a state media outlet while secretly supporting the revolution, and a drug lord with her own claims to destiny. When they discover a flaw in the androids, they max on it, and with the drugs vanishing from the streets and the tensions between the tattooed Taliit and the elite Kani boiling over, Isulum veers toward an uprising that will either remake or destroy it.

Blood Sacrifice was surprisingly entertaining. Q. Turner cleverly fuses literary dystopia with cyberpunk spectacle, building a world that becomes a triumph in itself. The worldbuilding gives readers a clear sense of class distinction, from the oligarchs to the tattooed and the underdogs. The imagery of the metaverse with assembly lines in prisons where inmates build androids to replace them is instantly imprinted on readers’ minds. The first-person narrative voice elevates the beauty of the writing, creating an intimate connection with the characters while cleverly dissecting their psyches. You’ll be captivated by Rita's doleful lyricism, Sana's fierce irony, and Sokolo's venomous self-pity. The dialogues are the fuel of the drama, and while the story can be slow at times, it skillfully delivers on its execution of the conflict, the themes of colonialism, faith, misogyny, and addiction. It is a story of what happens when a few humans play God.