pretty great title if you ask me.

so at least i d one thing.

to me, there is nothing that symbolizes the lack of romance in modern life quite the qr code. the fact that this book is full of them is the least of its worries.

among the biggest of my worries, you're surely wondering? thank you for asking. that's simple:

WHY DO MEN NEED TO WRITE SO MUCH ABOUT PENISES. i'm no prude but at a certain point spending this much time on phalluses takes up what we should've allotted to regularly scheduled programming, character development, or themes. you know. the little things. (buh dum ch.)

in fact, an inexcusable section of page count is spent on shock value, masturbation, gross-out descriptions, pop-culture references, and brand names. what we're left with couldn't amount to much even in the best case scenario.

i enjoy an unlikable character more than a likable most of the time, because i am annoying and my brain is a cesspool, but i can't bear an unsympathetic one. we spend 300 pages in the mind of glue, and what is intended to be an exploration of the millennial experience left me unmoved and unrepresented. and in spite of the synopsis' claim that this book centers around hong kong's protests and "demise," that felt an afterthought at best.

i d the author's first book, but this reads a lot the sophomore novel of someone whose debut was praised for its originality and literary quality when its most interesting portions were its observations of other art.

which is, you know. what happened.

bottom line: it's never a good sign when you're writing a rant on netgalley.com.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)1-star arc authors-of-color ...more100 s2 comments Mairi148 16

I really don't know what I think about this book. This is a hard one to review. For what it's worth, I absolutely adored Sheung-King's debut novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked.. I recommended it to so many people and I even put it on my favourites shelf. So when I learned the author was writing this one, I pre-ordered it immediately. Again, not something I usually do but I wanted to show my support.

I've now finally finished reading Batshit Seven and... Well, I'm not sure? It's a really strange story about identity, orientalism, and cultural displacement... And it's also about constipation and the main character's penis. Yeah...

Some of the time, the author's voice was intelligent, effortlessly quoting Fanon and Marx and making well-informed jabs at Canadian and Hong Kong society. I loved how temporally specific it was, the cultural references so perfectly painted a sense of space in time... Kind of a Wong Kar Wai film but about today's cultural zeitgeist. And then it would slip back into a chapter, or two, or three where the main character just talks about getting high and masturbating. Again, and again?

I think, and I might be wrong here, Batshit Seven is a coming of age story about that sort of post-university time when you hit the "real world" and go "oh shit is this it?". You're still brimming with the intellectualism of university life, but you haven't quite cracked the 9-5, and you're burning through the only relationships you have. The main character felt a kid. A smart kid who knows a lot about a lot of things, but still a kid - and one with his hands down his trousers at that.

I described this book at about the halfway point to a friend as "both intellectually complex and dumb as shit", and honestly as I write this review that's all I can think of.

Rated 2.5, rounded up to 3 out of respect to the author.7 s meghan 6

Interesting book about identity— fast paced with some moments that make you laugh.

QR codes that were included felt a friend pulling out their phone to give you reference points to understand what they were talking about (but sometimes you don’t really want to see the videos that they’re talking about).

-1 star for the aggressive dick content. I get it. 5 s Maeve 21

Reads a cry for help.
I am not the target audience. I don’t know who is.

Somehow also preachy.

I received the ARC copy for free. This does not affect my review. This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.Show full review5 s Laurel97 Read

I tried to this novel, as it’s different from my usual fare and I enjoyed the creative use of QR codes. However, Glue’s constant wanking, his obsession with his bowels and his general self-absorption irritated me, and I finally decided to stop forcing myself to finish the book.could-not-finish3 s Kaitlin10

Incredible, brilliant, and mesmerizing. I fell headfirst into the pacing and the prose and I couldn’t get out. I want to read it all over again. 3 s Megan108

This book is unusual in its diluted, straight forward presentation. I felt it was a great take on the complexities facing Hong Kong. I could have taken less about Glue’s constipation and masturbation.3 s Noel ???? 688 41

This book was batshit. I need brain bleach.2024 books-i-didnt- protagonists-of-color ...more2 s Zoe2,047 284

Insightful, candid, and immersive!

Bathsit Seven is a unique, colourful tale that takes us into the life of Glen “Glue” Wu, a young man who, after spending a few years attending university in Canada, returns to a politically tense Hong Kong where he finds himself in a serious rut spending his days drinking, getting high, spending the occasional time with platonic friends as well as those with benefits, masturbating, lackadaisically teaching ESL remotely, and contemplating what he wants out of life and where he actually fits into the world.

The writing is creative and direct. The characters are lonely, impulsive, and insecure. And the plot, told through narration and a scattering of QR Codes, is an engaging, perceptive tale about life, friendship, family, culture, politics, orientalism, racism, and self-identity.

Overall, Batshit Seven is a captivating, well-written, astute tale by Sheung-King that highlights the true struggles of coming of age in a contemporary world that seems to increasingly be more overwhelming, judgemental, and stressful.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.3 s Mia Watanabe8

A friend of the author lent me this book. A sort of decolonial mumblecore. Despite reading pages and pages about him masturbating, weirdly I’d to meet him one day.1 Quill226 2

Four stars moreso for what the book was going for rather than the actual execution of the vision.

The book is an elegy for the disappearing Hong Kong, a once vibrant place being entropically absorbed into the Chinese empire, which is echoed through Glue’s own ‘disappearing act’ as any sense of self disappears as he tries to find a stable living. TikToks, YouTubes and of course porn have become the new opiates of the masses, the pieces of content we allow to distract ourselves from our inherently disappointing lives.

Simple, declarative, understated prose. Occasionally very insightful. Relies too much reiterated notions from political theorists. Though sometimes theorists are directly quoted with citations, I do have qualms about instances such as ending of chapter 55 which nearly directly quotes Mark Fisher but doesn’t credit him; this actually wouldn’t bother me if the rest of the book wasn’t so reliant on citations. Why credit some but not all?

Though all the jacking off is true to life, many readers will wonder ‘did we need it?’ Sheung-King’s unflinching depiction of truth is actually what’s making them uncomfortable. I’ll concede that I too wondered about it however in seeing a mirror held up to my own reality, it could be that Glen Wu’s own passive descent into a system he knows to be destructive is too similar to my own, that his own ways of distracting and placating himself are too similar to my own. That mirror makes a reader uncomfortable but sometimes you need to be made uncomfortable with your routines to see the errs of your ways.

Discomfort is huge throughout the book. Glue’s slow self-orientalization transformation is fascinating and darkly hilarious. It is a surrender in the face of global powers, a heightened showcase of cynicism. Glue nearly escaped the system, but instead gets entrenched deeper and deeper, losing all sense of self. Unfortunately, Glue’s ‘Changlish’ speech gets dropped though the thematic trend continues.

QR codes were underwhelming. Probably should have had a couple hundred of them for it to properly land. As well, given Glue’s Pornhub obsession, it is certainly a pulled punch to not give us at least one QR code leading to some of the porn he’s watching.1 Adrienne Michetti201 15

I feel the reviewers here have really underestimated and underrated this book. Not that I think it's a masterpiece, but it certainly is a complex and critical commentary on colonialism, whiteness, Orientalism, surveillance capitalism, meritocracy, and academia.

Sheung-King has taken a page out of The Confederacy of Dunces and presented us with Glue, our vapid anti-hero. However, while on the surface Glue is one-dimensional, flat, and uninspired, on a closer look the reader understands, through his memories, that Glue is in fact both creative and intellectual. Is it his proximity to whiteness that has made him less of both of these things? His relative wealth? His family privilege? Or is it a colonial government? Or is it just Glue himself who has given up on himself, distraught but numb after returning to Hong Kong from Canada, heartbroken and jobless?

This book has no clear, concise, or satisfying plot. Readers will struggle to decide what the real conflict is, or where the story is going. But that is the point. Glue himself isn't going anywhere, really. And yet as the reader you get to follow along, seeing what led to his slow, gradual unraveling both within his lifetime and long before it began.

The QR code inclusions were a distraction for me. I felt that Sheung-King was trying to do what Doug Coupland did in the 90s with Generation X. But the difference is that the YouTube videos encoded in Batshit Seven ly won't work in a decade, whereas Coupland's sidebars were reflecting a visual text reality playing out on the new WWW.

I suspect Batshit Seven will be taught in literature and writing classes in the future as an example of how to capture cultural and colonial generational changes across nations and decades. Glue will also ly be the subject of many character studies.

I look forward to reading whatever Sheung-King gives us next. If it's anything this, it will be deceptively sharp and relevant. Kristen Wooten26

I have no idea what I just read, but I d it. Glue is a character I can simultaneously sympathize with and wonder if he’s even human. If anything, maybe my overall thoughts on the book come from a place of no understanding: the Hong-Kong culture, the Chinese experience, the straight male experience, and so much more.

But, despite the parts that made me question picking up the book to begin with, I’ve been left with a sense of wonder and a deeper analysis of the world around me. I agree, ultimately, with the synopsis in which is says that it encapsulates the millennial experience. I don’t agree 100%, but enough that I relate to Glue as a 1993-born millennial myself.

At best, it’s certainly worth the read. At worst, it’ll look awesome on any bookshelf. Daniel Kukwa4,306 103

It's the quality of the writing that lifts this to 3 stars...because the story is all about a protagonist who frustrates me with his apathy and his lethargic issues, while everyone around him is so self-centered and oblivious that it makes me want to wretch. There's only so far I can go with a well-written novel about characters I intensely dis.canadian-lit ReadinWithSteven31 1 follower

And Sheung-King continues to have the most vivid writing I've ever experienced. The clipped writing style is full of so much that I could just keep gathering by rereading this over and over. This was perfect. Enid Wray1,084 51 Read

Clearly I am NOT the reader for this title - as neither was I for his first novel.

In fact I have no idea who the reader for this would be.

Time to accept that Sheung-King and I will never have a meeting of literary minds.

DNF Daniel InnesAuthor 1 book3

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