The brothel at the end of the world. In an endless city the beautiful resourceless are saved from culling to be courtesans, trapped in interminable debt to their owners and at the mercy of the clients, deadly in itself. One returns from death seeking revenge and the narrator's ambivalent connection to the returnee and to her own life is a tale not of a heart of gold, but of a heart, as stained and tattered as her world, but still beating. It is a bit softer really than it should be, this conclusion a bit less pitted than the body of the story. ( )

Sometime in the future, society has devolved to the point where the rich have all the power and it's clearly coded in the law to stay that way. Jewel, our narrator, is a courtesan who is making the best of her situation, but she knows that her keepers have all the power and resources. Her friend, Winfield, dies and comes back to life, determined to visit revenge on her murderer.

This powerful, award-winning novella stretched my brain cells reading. You're dropped right in, and Jewel's stream of consciousness thought process is elliptical, not explaining a lot of the things she already knows. The writing style was tough for me, and the characters are not quite as important the idea of the story and exploring what the end result of a corrupt capitalistic society could look like. It's not exactly an enjoyable read, but it's the kind of story you want to talk about once you've read, and it'll stick with me for awhile. ( )

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Self-esteem, self-love, class solidarity, friendship, Love...big, big themes to tackle in under a hundred pages. Yet as one expects from Premee Mohamed, tackled they are, and indeed pinned to the mat of argument.

There are those who say they have no patience for future-set stories, yet who will gobble the stories that center amateur sleuths who are not arrested and abused by police and courts who do not approve of this behavior...inconsistent much? Each is unbelievable in its own way, and this story’s amateur sleuths have some *very* powerful motives for their far higher stakes poking around. I know others whose taste in storytelling excludes tales that begin in medias res. That being a taste that can not be argued with, I warn those folk that this is not one for them.

The authorial voice here, Jewel’s stream of consciouness and self-aware of its floridity, would wear on my nerve if it lasted more than the eightyish pages that it does. In this size of a dose, it counterpoints the horrifying, bleak dystopia that these young people are...existing is a better fit than living...within. The brothel where they work is a reputable one, yet a client murders one of them and no one in power cares, or pursues justice.

Sound familiar, y’all?

Unlike boring old twenty-first century reality, though, the murdered party returns for revenge, not as a zombie or vampire but simply undead. Go with it. As the co-sex-worker Winfield sets about getting the revenge that I myownself feel is richly deserved, the story meditates on the larger, darker themes of living in a hypercapitalist hellscape. The ending is, as expected, satisfying. The truths Author Mohamed tells us in the course of this bleak vision of a future where money = justice, where might = rights, where even the meagerest of existences is contingent on selling one’s own body for the gratification of others, are readily applicable to the world around us.

That horrifying truth is how this very short, sharp shock to the reader’s system won the very high-powered awards that it did. Very highly recommended. ( )

A book that leaves you with a sense of having visited a different world, a haunting memory, and a longing to return is certainly one in which I can say the author accomplished their goal of telling a damn good story. And this book by Premee Mohamad does that. With lyrical, flourishing prose it paints a picture, sometimes one as cloying as the perfumes I imagine which linger in the hall of the capital-h House. A woman who doesn't stay dead, and upon realizing the power she holds by being outside of the societal structures, it could be an allegory for the lives of those today who choose to operate outside of the bounds of our capitalist, patriarchal society. Especially since the world of this book, the world outside of the House, definitely could be considered our own should things be allowed to continue unchecked and the people disposed of, uncared for.

I'm not sure we cheer for any of the characters, but their journeys certainly are intriguing. Their motivations sometimes fully on display and other times elusive and chameleon-like. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it can also taste sweet, and sometimes as heady as a rich, whiskey.

If there's one complaint I have about this title, it's that the writing with it's reliance on over-long sentences combined with the flowery prose almost becomes too much at points. And to my editor's eye, it took a couple of chapters before I quit looking at just...how...long... the sentences were and became swept up in the story. This book won a Nebula award for best novella, and I can see why, if nothing else than for the fact that it had a very literary feel to it, more atmosphere and mood, and not so much a play-by-play of the action. Which, to be fair, in this story, I'm not sure a play-by-play would be warranted.

In the end, this is a book which kept me reading and drew me into its strange and twisty world that I'm still thinking about the morning after. So while I may still be having extensional thoughts about sentence length and grammar rules, I have to say, that if the story pulls in the reader and leaves a hunting memory, do the mechanics really matter that much? The story worked. ( )

When Jewel's best friend and fellow courtesan dies at the hands of a client, the last thing they expect is for Win to come back from the dead and take revenge.

To me, this felt like Fight Club crashing into The Past is Red – but with courtesans.

The language employed in the story is poetic and floral. It's beautiful. In my head, it was narrated by Marla from Fight Club, which is part of why it reminded me so strongly of that book. But poetic and flowery language is difficult for me to connect with, so I end up feeling outside the story. But because of my inability to engage, I couldn't even picture the world on the page.