Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book
Rate this book
Her fate is in her flesh.
In an environmentally fragile world where human and animal genes combine, the rarest mutation of all--the Trader--can instantly switch genders. One such Trader--female Sorykah--is battling her male alter, Soryk, for dominance and the right to live a full life.

Sorykah has rescued her infant twins from mad Matuk the Collector. Her children are safe. Her journey, she believes, is over, but Matuk's death has unleashed darker, more evil forces. Those forces--led by the Collector's son--cast nets that stretch from the glittering capital of Neubonne to the murky depths below the frozen Sigue, where the ink of octameroons is harvested to make addictive, aphrodisiac tattoos. Bitter enemies trapped within a single skin, Sorykah and Soryk are soon drawn into a sinister web of death and deceit.

363 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Loading interface...
Loading interface...

About the author

Kirsten Imani Kasai

7 books53 followers
Kirsten Imani Kasai is the author of three novels: The House of Erzulie, Ice Song and Tattoo.



Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
8 (19%)
4 stars
12 (28%)
3 stars
8 (19%)
2 stars
10 (23%)
1 star
4 (9%)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for Kara-karina.
1,681 reviews268 followers
April 14, 2012
Kirsten Imani Kasai's books are so weird and unique, they stay with you for a long time. I've mentioned already that Ice Song was a very mad, visually bizarre, wild ride, but I quite liked it.

You certainly can not shove Ice Song series into any one catergory. There is a generous part of fantasy, a bit of dystopia with a sprinkle of sci-fi and even erotica present all of which confound and lure you deeper into the intricate plot. Very visual and quite dark, Tattoo just like its predecessor explores the corporate greed and the world of vice in a setting similar to Alaska during Gold Rush.

The characters feel like they just stepped out from Rocky Horror Show - vivid, dramatic and always askew:

Sorykah who is desperately trying to reject her curse and live a normal life; her selfish , impulsive and naive male counterpart - Soryk. Chen, Matuk's son, drowning his emptiness in drugs, slowly dying Sidra The Lovely, the queen of the hidden forest kingdom of mutants...

The writing is complicated and doesn't flow very well, it took me awhile to get through it. Kirsten's work is not for everyone, and you won't be able to understand the second book without reading the first (even then it's not guaranteed), but there is a certain beauty in its madness, which I found unforgettable.
Profile Image for Louisa.
7,513 reviews82 followers
January 25, 2015
This was a pretty good book, I admit to skimming, and yeah, the ending was pretty good!
410 reviews
April 2, 2023
Finally, finished the book. Ended up getting another book out before I finished this one as it was hard to get into. Was thinking of putting it down and not finish but I did.
Profile Image for Alena.
4 reviews1 follower
May 16, 2013
I keep wavering back and forth on the rating for this book. I've changed it several times so far. The outline of the plot made me want to rate it a 3, but the execution makes me keep changing it back to a 2.

I read Ice Song the other week and I thought the whole Trader premise was interesting and rather unique. I don't think I've read another book in which the characters are capable of readily shifting between male and female. I was a little disappointed with how everything was building up to the action in Ice Song, but the climax felt so short and sudden, like the author ran out of pages and had to tie it up suddenly. I was hoping for something a little more polished with Tattoo.

Ultimately I thought the overall plot of Tattoo was more intriguing, but I think the world Ms. Kasai created started to make far less sense and some of the details thrown in were irrelevant and added for the wrong reasons. She did manage to bring in a lot of random details from the first book (e.g. the white woman), but some felt forced into the story. As far as her world building: the setting seems far different than in the previous book. In Ice Song there was a submarine, but characters needed using dog sleds to travel any great distance across the frozen land. They communicated with hand written letters. Suddenly in Tattoo there's also a few trains, cars, motorcycles, magnet-induced hovering platforms, and more. There are email capable pdf/smartphone contraptions. Digital video can be immediately streamed across cities. Heck, they have tiny marble-like things that can be embedded in walls and somehow even in clothing to read bodily information like breathing pace/effort, heart rate, body temperature, etc. The jump from early industrial (or at least that's what I likened it to) to advanced civilization seemed a little odd.

The worst part for me is that suddenly all the women are falling into saintly or whore roles, and the men are almost all lust-driven and unable to think beyond their genitals. The main (female) character, Sorykah seems to think her male alter is a lustful beast who can't control himself, but is suddenly quite sex-obsessed herself. The author seems to feel she needs to describe most every uncomfortable sex-related incident, most of which seem to boil down to the men being so overcome with passion and the women thinking it's wrong but being so driven by their uncontrollable inner sex-goddess that they can't help but be enraptured by it.

Overall, I liked the initial premise. I was intrigued by the plot the author presented at the start, but her need to add more and more random details took away from what could have been a great book and made the characters less likable and somehow more two-dimensional. Tattoo left a third book wide open, but I have a feeling the next book will likely feel even more disjointed when the author tries to tie in every single detail while developing the next plot. As much as I love to follow a series through until the end, and I liked the idea of Traders and octamaroons, I won't be reading the next one.
Profile Image for Kelly.
616 reviews155 followers
July 29, 2011
Tattoo, the sequel to Ice Song, takes readers back into Kirsten Imani Kasai’s ravaged yet eerily beautiful world, picking up Sorykah’s story just after her rescue of her twin babies from the mad Matuk the Collector. She’d love to return to normal life, but fate has other plans.

Kasai’s prose is as beautiful as ever. In the haunting prologue, she once again evokes a fairy-tale atmosphere as she tells the creation myth of the octameroons: human/octopus hybrids like Sorykah’s acquaintance Rava. Then we move back into the present, where Tirai Industries is exploiting the octameroons for their ink. This ink is used in addictive tattoos that destroy the bodies and minds of their wearers, just as surely as the harvesting process destroys the octameroons and the ice fields in which they live. Sorykah learns that the very submarine she works on, the Nimbus, is involved in this trade.

Meanwhile, Sorykah has another problem. During her quest to defeat Matuk, she gained the ability to switch more easily between her female primary self and her male alter, Soryk. Now, any extreme of emotion can make her switch involuntarily. This leads to poignant conflicts. Soryk doesn’t care about the babies as Sorykah does, and Sorykah doesn’t care about Soryk’s lover the way he does, and so each of them has the potential to thwart the other’s purposes while the other is dormant.

Sorykah is then manipulated into participating in a scheme that doesn’t really serve her goals or Soryk’s, and in which she is essentially a figurehead. As a result, the plot of Tattoo loses some emotional urgency as compared to Ice Song. Whatever your opinion of the cause itself, it’s not Sorykah’s cause in the same way that rescuing her children was. In Ice Song, she was a player. Here, she’s more of a pawn, and a pair of eyes through which to show us more of the setting. Several of the other point-of-view characters are unsympathetic, and my other favorite from Ice Song — Dunya the dog-faced girl — gets a sweet resolution but not enough page time.

Post-prologue, the plot itself is less fairy-tale-ish than that of its predecessor, which is also a little disappointing. I don’t mind reading about corporate sabotage and drugs and organized crime, but there was a mythic quality to Ice Song that is less evident here.

Ice Song is a self-contained gem that didn’t need a sequel to feel complete — though I was definitely thrilled to see one! By contrast, Tattoo needs a sequel. It raises as many questions as it answers and leaves several plotlines on uncertain notes. I’m curious what will happen next in the intriguing world Kasai has created, and I hope the mythic aspects stick around.

Written for FantasyLiterature.com
Profile Image for Ivy.
28 reviews3 followers
January 1, 2013
So much potential, but it all falls flat.

This was a random buy for me, no one recomended it, I just read the back, picked a couple random 'test' pages to read, then read some of the beginning and having liked the 3-5 pages I'd read as well as the back, I bought it, thinking that what I'd read would reflect the quality of the book itself. To which the books response was a resounding: LOL!Nope!

The major issue is that the author doesn't know how to thread one event to another very well, she's the opposite of tolkien when it comes to descriptive paragraphs and surroundings (but unlike someone like Orson Scott Card, who doesn't do descriptions, she doesn't make up for this with any wealth of emotions or character thoughts).
This book very badly needs an editor, there were spelling errors that I (a dyslexic) could catch, and quite a few things were poorly phrased (this coming from someone who enjoys yoda-like sentences) or seemed to be disconnected thoughts/plot-points which sometimes led nowhere at all.
Actually though the *plot* was good, the *concepts* were geat, the *story* was neither of those things.
The book isn't really told like a tale, people talk and events happen, but the characters jump from event to event, sometimes with no so much as a mention as to where they were in the middle. A good for instance of this can be had when the main character leaves her/his lover, and is running through the forrest away and almost nothing is described of her surroundings or where she's going, nor explicitly WHY she's going some place.

Another complaint I have is the lack of doing anything with the mythology other than mentioning it. The entire beginning chapter is devoted to it, and the mythology was really interesting but it seemed to me like the author mostly sort of ignored it after that.
Honestly I loved that(the mythology) part, mostly because of the writing style there; if the author writes a book that's *all* in that style, I'll read it, but,(at least in this book) her first person character writing suuuucks is lacking.

It probably doesn't help that because I picked up this book not realizing that it was related to anything else, I had no idea what half the story-history references were too. (The book doesn't mention anywhere that it's a sequel and had to guess from some of the lacking information in the novel and a mention to past events that I should even look for a previous novel [which lo and behold there is])

It is safe to say, if nothing else, that this book is not stand-alone.
(And needs an editor)
I unfortunately do not think it's writing quality is high enough to seek out the frist one and read it... I may try to read something else from this author, but I'll make sure to read more than a few pages BEFORE I buy it just in case.

I don't recomend this book, unless you plan to re-write it.
November 18, 2011
Reviewed for Wickedly Bookish Reviews
http://wickedlybookish.blogspot.com/

I need to clear something up in response to all the negative reviews.

This is not a book you can read without having read the first one! The world is intricate and fantastic just like any other deep fantasy book. The Ice Song books are also very dark and at times strange, but no less beautiful for these elements' existence. If that is not something you are into, and you are not a fan of deep fantasy then you probably won't like this book. So before you make a harsh 2 star or lower judgment on it, I suggest you take the time to read book 1, it is only fair to this amazing author's hard work.

With that out of the way,Tattoo is a beautiful follow up book. The characters and the morbidly beautiful world are just as wonderful and developed as you remember them. My only complaint is that the plot wasn't as well fleshed out as Ice Song. I felt like book one had a solid plot. We knew what the objective was and we were emotionally invested in the outcome. In book two, it is less clear what exactly is the objective. Soryk wants his own life free from his primary Sorykah who just wants to live a quiet life with her children.

Readers get a better understanding of some of the supporting characters like Sidra the Lovely and Dunya the dog-faced girl. We also get lessons in some of the more concrete mythology of the world. I found these aspects very enjoyable and a nice distraction from the uncertainty of the major plot line.

Overall, it is worth a read for those who have read the first book. Laying the groundwork for other prospective installments, Tattoo will continue your journey through this vividly strange world.
Profile Image for Carolyn.
1,771 reviews77 followers
April 24, 2012
Book 2 following Ice Song which I LOVED. Book 1 was just somehow the exact right book at the exact right time and I couldn't put it down. This sequel took me unexpectedly numerous tries (and numerous overdue library fines) to get into...but about halfway through I found myself intensely engaged with the characters again.

This is dark, oh so very very dark. I mean people complain about the Dragon Tattoo books and their violence toward women...but is that only a problem if the author is a man? (I personally don't find it problematic to read about [hello, real world] and wonder if that's the issue.)

Terrible things happen to so many people in these books as the world falls apart over and over. Intimacy and what it means to you and whether that's tangled up in sex (or not) and how it gets violated and when that matters and when that doesn't = huge theme here.

Very cool, innovative fantasy ideas in both books. Interesting world building.

I was sad to end w/ Soryk (rather than Sorykah).
Profile Image for Ryandake.
404 reviews54 followers
July 12, 2012
got to page 93... cannot finish.

i see from other reviews that this book is a sequel to Ice Song, a fact not made evident by any copy on the front or back covers. this is cheating. it's bait-and-switch: you think you're getting a standalone book, but instead, just when you've lost patience anyway, you find you have to buy another book to make sense of the one you're reading.

very, very irksome.

which is a shame, cause there are some intriguing aspects to this book: gender-shifting humans, weird human/animal mixes, fairy queens with significant sexual appetites, and an unhappy demon ready to rise from myth under a frozen sea.

and Kasai's writing isn't bad, altho it sometimes seems to entirely lack connective tissue (which may be a result of it's being a sequel). one finds oneself here, then there, and then way over there, with no explanation of what the connections are, or why you should care. again, maybe that's in Ice Songs, but i suspect there are some problems like that in the first book as well.

so, a disappointment.
Profile Image for Luanne.
441 reviews
September 20, 2011
Tattoo is the sequel to Ice Song by Kirsten Ivani Kasai. Kasai has a great writing style, very descriptive and puts the reader into a character and the scene. Sorykah/Soryk journey continues as they try to support and care for the twins. But Sorykah/Soryk are leading different lives, so how will they co-exist together. I do recommend these books.
336 reviews3 followers
August 15, 2011
The book cover is beautiful, but I couldnt get past the 30th page.It was just too much info to process and keep up with.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.