Many thanks to NetGalley and Rebellion for providing me with an eARC of Three Eight One in exchange for my honest review!

I can admire how ambitiously this tries to portray its intertwined stories, but it left me feeling pretty damn confused and detached for significant stretches of time. It reminds me a bit of After World by Debbie Urbanski, another sci-fi book that weaves together separate story arcs and timelines in order to convey an intricate and thought-provoking narrative. However, I'd connected much more deeply with After World (enough that it's becoming one of my favorite books of 2023), whereas Rowena and Fairly's journeys fail to get me all that invested in them, even as I'm recognizing the laudable effort that Whiteley has put into crafting this strange tale. There's a charm about it that I can appreciate as it presents a multilevel and puzzle-like structure for readers to interpret for themselves. If only my brain and my soul could latch onto it and try to solve it.

Overall, I'm officially rating Three Eight One 2.5 out of 5 stars, which I'll round down to 2 stars. I wish I could be higher on it, but I'll keep an eye out for more of Whiteley's work in the future.

A little confusing in the back and forth but I don’t think this will be an issue in the physical copy. Become more engaged the more I read, and testament to the great writing because I’m not a sci fi person but I was invested.

Three Eight One is an interesting premise; a curator from 300 years in the future becomes obsessed with a story from 2024 and is drawn into its mysteries – but is it fact or fiction?

Most of this book focuses on the story that is being told about Fairly and her quest on the Horned Road, with asides and comments from the historian written in footnotes. Thankfully these are clickable in the Kindle edition which makes them easy to read but I’m not sure how well they’d work in a print version – you’d either have to spend a lot of time flicking backwards and forwards (there are 85 of them in total), or they must take up a lot of room at the bottom of each page. I personally found these just ended up breaking up the flow of the narrative and I found myself getting annoyed at them – particularly as I got more engaged in the fantasy story.

I really liked the idea of a future historian reading a text from present day and trying to piece things together, but I think it was a real shame and a missed opportunity that the novel the author chose to write was a straight fantasy. There is nothing in Fairly’s story that mirrors or parallels real life and so I found myself caring very little about what the historian thought of any of it. If there had been references to life now, or asides where she misunderstood certain things or had incorrect information, it could have been quite a fun read, but I found the footnotes to be increasingly irritating.

The fantasy story itself was an ok read, however it’s very fractured and I struggled to picture or understand a lot of what was being written about. I didn’t understand the Breathing Man or the Cha or the fact that everyone didn’t seem to mind that certain people just went on quests. The chain machines that were sometimes buttons and sometimes phones also made little sense. I think there could have been a stronger or darker reveal about what the quest really was, and after the reveal the rest of the story just got confusing. I didn’t really feel like we got to know Fairly as a character either, she made some odd choices and took quite a lot of side tangents on her quest.

Overall, I found Three Eight One to be a bit of a mess, the fantasy element of the story took away from the historian narrative, and the story itself was muddled and frustrating. Thank you to NetGalley & Rebellion – Solaris for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

What a foggy, confusing, and enlightening story this is! Reading this book was sort of like sitting down to read, only to have a person just leaning over and speaking to you about their life, which feels related, interrupting your flow, from the footnotes. They turn out to be a friend, earnestly trying to help you make sense of things. Since this person is speaking from centuries after Fairly's story (set in 2024), the historical context and archival citations they offer provide extra fun.
Confusing is not, for me, a bad thing. The reading experience for this reminded me of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant or Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Maybe it's not always clear, but there is meaning to find. (Will it be the same meaning others get? Only maybe!) I'll be reflecting on this book for a long time, and genuinely look forward to the time I sit down to it again.

I'm not even sure how to write a review for this one, which is probably the highest compliment I can pay it - it's engrossing, genre-defying, brilliantly written speculative fiction at its absolute finest and I LOVED IT. This has solidified Aliya Whiteley as one of my top favorite modern writers - the ability to weave such a complex, multilayered story together is a true talent and I'll read anything else she writes. WOW, just wow.

Speculative fiction at its best, a well written and thought provoking story that I found intriguing and kept me enthralled.
I wanted to know what was going to happen and learn more about the symbolic elements and the plot.
Well plotted, excellent storytelling.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A mind bending, genre blurring literary fiction style adventure full of dystopia and adventure. You can see the impact of the first pandemic in this authors writing but that just makes it even more compelling.

From the beginning of Three Eight One, I couldn’t stop reading. I read it in the vet’s office, from the front seat of countless car rides, and in stolen moments before bed. I found myself constantly wanting to know what came next. Whiteley has created a speculative masterpiece. When you think you have it figured out, the next chapter completely changes the shape of the characters and alters the narrative structure. Three Eight One is easily one of the best genre-blending speculative books I have read, and I have no doubt it will be one of my favorite books of the year.

Three Eight One is a story within a story. It opens in 2314, where a curator of the twenty-first-century internet uncovers a story posted online in 2024. That archived story is about Fairly. Fairly’s story is set in a world that’s somewhere between a fantasy world and a dystopian version of our own. When Fairly is chosen as a Quester, she must leave her hometown to travel the mysterious Horned Road. The rest of Three Eight One follows Fairly as she travels across foreign lands, spends what little money and goodwill she has, and encounters mystical creatures called Cha. Along the way, Fairly is taunted and followed by a terrifying being known only as the Breathing Man.

Three Eight One is a story about being on the precipice of adulthood. It’s about making decisions, sometimes regretting those decisions, and learning about yourself in the process. It’s about chasing away your demons, running away from them, and learning you are better off living with them in the end.

If you like clean endings and well-divined themes, Three Eight One is likely not for you. Three Eight One leans heavily into literary fiction and leaves much open for discussion and debate. While I think I picked up on some of the themes, it is impossible to really know. For me, Three Eight One was a novel that dealt with mental health, anxiety, the lies of society, and even chronic health struggles. I firmly believe this is a book that will have different meanings for different readers, though.

Three Eight One might be for you if:
**you like cross-genre titles that blend literary fiction and SFF.
**you enjoy fantasy adventure stories with young adults from small towns who go on a quest.
**you’re into journeys that cross cities, caverns, mountains, and maybe even go into space.
**you like themes of mental health in your books.

Final Thoughts: I loved this novel. The combination of literary fiction, fantasy, and science fiction worked so well for me. Fairly’s fantastical journey and the themes within it made this a perfect read for me.

Rating: 5+/5 Stars. Incredible. I wouldn’t be surprised to find this among my top reads of the year come December.

Thanks to Solaris for providing an advanced review copy. All the above thoughts are my own.
Review will be posted on Back Shelf Books at the link below on release date - January 16, 2024

It's many years after the "Age of Riches" (our time) and archivist Rowena Savalas is reading a story about a young woman. Fairly's tale meanders, doesn't really seem to have a central purpose, and relates the long walking journey that Fairly takes. It seems to be a rite of passage, and the walkers, or questers as they are called, walk the horned road, and know that they are pursued by the Breathing Man. Fairly spends most of the time alone, but occasionally meets the occasional person, spends a little time in towns, and even encounters the Breathing Man, a terrifying experience for her. Fairly doesn't seem to be really engaged otherwise with the people she does meet, and her feelings often underwhelm.

This embedded story is part fable, part fairy tale, part coming of age story, part something else. As Rowena reads, she annotates, commenting on aspects of the society in the story, her own society and some of her experiences.

Rowena is uncertain about parts of the tale, as she is reviewing content that might be corrupted, and/or some of the tale's idiom and common knowledge are lost due to time. Rowena notices that the document has a specific structure: each section has exactly 381 words in it (and I suspect 381 sections, though I didn't count them).

There is no sense given by author Aliya Whiteley what the purpose of Fairly's story is, not what one is to take away from it.

I found Rowena's few mentions of her own society interesting, though somewhat callous (not that ours is much better). For example, no one gets to live past 70 years in Rowena's world, which reminded me a little of Logan's Run, and of the planet in Star Trek:TNG when people had to die by a certain age.

This book is both odd and intriguing, and often perplexing; it is not one for everyone. It's frustrating, and refuses to yield answers to the questions it raises in Fairly's story, and Rowena's life is barely explored, leaving one puzzled by the end. I've read one other Whiteley story before this, and I had a similar experience, though this novel is even more challenging.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Rebellion for this ARC in exchange for a review.

This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Three Eight One will be released on January 16, 2024.

Aliya Whiteley doesn’t have an enormous following in my corners of genre fandom, but I’ve heard her cited several times as an exceptional author who leans into the weird and literary sides of the genre. I don’t always like weird and literary, but I sometimes do, and I often enjoy found document stories, so when I had the opportunity to get an advance copy of Three Eight One, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to give her work a shot. 

Three Eight One is narrated by a 24th century would-be historian, sifting through the digital detritus from the Age of Riches to try to find something of value. She happens across an obscure document published in 2024, tagged as autobiography but also as science fiction and fantasy, consisting of a quest narrative broken up into sections of exactly 381 words each. The vast majority of the novel is the reproduced text of this strange narrative, titled “The Dance of the Horned Road,” liberally interspersed with footnotes from the narrator as she tries to understand just what the document could’ve meant to the original audience, and whether it has anything worthwhile to say about her own search for meaning in her life. 

“The Dance of the Horned Road” is a deeply mystifying quest tale, taking place in a world that seems to have technologically advanced beyond the real 2024, but starring a character whose village appears to be mostly cut off from the rest of the world. Their primary connection to the outside world is via the horned road, which calls adventuresome young adults on ritual quests with no clear objective and an implacable antagonist—the breathing man—whose form and motivations are unclear. 

And for a while, this tale is fascinating solely for its strangeness, with the steady stream of confused footnotes from the 24th century narrator adding endearingly amusing color, even if it doesn’t add any clarity. But as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that no infusion of purpose is on the horizon. In fact, I would argue that the aimlessness is in many ways the point. 

Because at its heart, Three Eight One is a book advancing a deep skepticism about externally imposed meaning in life. Both the lead of the frame story and the lead of “The Dance of the Horned Road” keep expecting to find meaning somewhere, and they are consistently disappointed. It’s a direct subversion of the grand fantasy epic--things happen for no rhyme or reason, and the lead responds accordingly, making decisions based purely on the whims of the moment. 

This leads to a handful of truly horrifying moments, alongside a heaping helping of “why exactly is this happening, and why should I care?” Because while the meaning of life is a pretty ambitious theme to tackle in a novel, it’s hard to tell a story that doesn’t matter and generate investment from the reader. The free-flowing prose made it easy to keep reading, and it’s hard to deny that some of the vignettes are intriguing. But once it becomes clear that there’s no grand purpose, other than a demonstration of purposelessness, the rest of the book feels a lot like playing out the string. 

This is not to say that there is no development of character. Both leads come to similar conclusions about externally imposed purpose, and that forces a mindset shift that decreases the importance of their circumstances and increases the importance of their actions. And there are more than a few scenes along the way that comment pretty sharply on how systems can be perpetuated despite no individuals in the system really committing to serve it. It’s Kafkaesque in a way that reminds me very much of some of the early scenes in Josiah Bancroft’s Senlin Ascends.  

On the whole, there’s a lot I appreciate about Three Eight One. The themes come through loud and clear, and some of the individual scenes are truly excellent. But the overarching drive of the narrative works against the creation of a story that a reader can really sink into. Make no mistake, that’s all intentional—it’s an ambitious and difficult project, but the project itself is clear. It’s just a project that makes it difficult to maintain full immersion, and for long stretches, I found myself appreciating it more than truly enjoying it. 

Recommended if you like: books that make you go "what?" Exploration of meaning in life. 

Overall rating: 13 of Tar Vol's 20. Three stars on Goodreads.

I had to sit on my thoughts for a few days to finally write my review,

I already read "From the Neck up" by Aliya Whiteley and enjoyed it so much that I simply want to explore everything this author writes and wrote. So I was very happy to receive this ARC.

The author wrote this book in parts during the first wave of the pandemic and I think in some parts that is something you really can see shine through the themes of this book. I especially think that the storyline of Fairly was a fix idea that flowed out of Aliya Whiteley and then it became clear that something is missing to let the story stand on its own.
As a result we get the perspective and footnotes of Rowena a few hundred years after the time stamp of the inner novel. And I really liked how it added a layer and meaning to the story. It shows how you can be transfixed by a story and find yourself in it - but also how a story is able to disconnect you from yourself and how it is quite hard to return to said self. I loved how we lost Rowena for quite some chapters and got to know her again during the end and her reflection of the meanings for the story, for Fairly and for herself.

The story of the Horned Road is another matter in itself. One of the first things I recocnized (at the same time Rowena did) was the total formal restriction the chapters are concstructed. It is amazing how Aliya Whiteley had the stamina to write every single chapter with exactly 381 words and added another mystery to the story. There is just one open ended chapter and it is a little bit confusing for my why there weren't more - it would have been totally relatable for a story of growing up to have more "lose ends".
Another thing I noticed was the changing of the perspectives. Fairly's story is sometimes told via I, you or in the third perspective. I wondered if this is another layer of developement that shows Fairly's way into adulthood or if there is another meaning behind the changes (I couldn't find one!).

Overall this was as much a fun and creepy and challenging experience as the short stories I was already able to read from this author and I definitely will read more from Aliya Whiteley!

“Three Eight One” is a novel that may leave you mesmerised or perplexed, but it won’t leave you indifferent. It is difficult to describe as it doesn’t subscribe to any particular genre. It is part-fantasy, part-sci-fi, part a parable of the magical realism kind. For me, that sort of elusive uniqueness is a sign of a great book that will stay with you long after you read it.
I suppose the value of a book lies in how it interacts with the reader. “Three Eight One” spoke to me and held me and carried me alongside its protagonist named Fairly, a young woman who embarked on a quest on the Horned Road. And I went with her.
So many associative memories flooded my mind as I read about Fairly’s encounters with mystical creatures called “cha”, her fleeing from her inseparable shadow/pursuer/companion/guardian angel (?) whom she refers to as the breathing man, the mistakes she couldn’t forgive herself for and yet walked away from, and the ventures she found herself drawn into but somehow managed to extricate herself from once she came to her senses…
You will find many touches of creative ingenuity in this book which will touch you, inspire and amuse you in equal measure. The cha on the pig farm gave me shivers.
“Three Eight One” is a philosophical reflection on what it means to come of age, to venture and discover, to grow and judge the world for yourself – and to change it. It felt to me like “Alice in Wonderland” ten-twenty years on.

Three is the magic number. And eight. And one. And the letters they stand for (CHA) which which are pig-like furry creatures that populate the world of Fairly. 90% of this story is a take on the ‘hero’s quest’ in which seventeen-year Fairly - like all in her world - sets off on a coming-of-age journey away from the village of childhood to find herself. Along the way she meets publicans, the aforementioned cha, hipsters in a combi and some princes living in the woods. If this all sounds like mythic elements from different sources all mashed together, then that’s absolutely what it reads like. Because the other 10% of the story is a framing narrative told by far-future archivist Rowena who is annotating Fairly’s story, which is a document uploaded to the web in 2024: so a story. Fairly’s quest has a profound effect on Rowena, and she begins to question many of the givens in her society - that the consciousness can be streamed to a succession of physical bodies ad infinitum, for example.

Rowena’s story is told in the annotating footnotes, and once you’ve turned the kindle font size up these are where the real impact of this novel lies. You mustn’t skip the footnotes, or you’ve missed the whole point of the novel. Fairly’s world makes no sense - bits of it are medieval, yet there are spaceships going to distant planets. Fairly herself is on a spaceship then off it again in short order. Phones can only ring one person. Rowena’s briefly glimpsed world, by contrast, is described with complete conviction and logic.

This is not an easy novel to summarise. Parts are exasperating, yet the overall effect by the end is disquieting and profound. Does a story have to be well-written, or even make sense, to affect us? Rowena’s world - the age of curation - is drowning in the information our age produces on a second by second basis. So what of it has any worth or meaning? Will it be novels by the finest literary minds of our generation that will endure, or a naive and nonsensical story written by a teenager. And - if it moves someone - does it matter? Whiteley of course begs the question of whether her story moves us as much as Fairly’s does Rowena. By crowding Rowena into the margins, yet putting the entire meaning of the story with her, Whiteley asks a lot of the reader. Not everyone will stick with it, , but for those who click with it it'll hit hard.

Reading this felt a bit like stumbling across a lost episode of The Good Place, or being inside a video game. There was that same sense of a setting that isn't quite within physical reality, a landscape dotted with baffling objects—chain devices, a conveniently located boat, a bright pink pavilion tent—but available only in fuzzy resolution everywhere that isn't the foreground. A world that exists only when being observed. I mean, all novels are that, but they don't all give you such a strong impression of being that. It's very hard to tell if Three Eight One's gnomic philosophy is profound or irritatingly vague. Some elements, like Fairly's coming-of-age through experiencing work and travel, appealed to me more than others (her mother's lack of engagement; the whole episode in the swamp with the First to Fall.) I have no doubt I'll keep thinking about it, but my immediate reaction upon finishing is that it's a bit of a head-scratcher.

Do I fully understand this book? Honestly, I do not. Yet somehow, I still kind of liked it? Unusual, that, since I usually just get angry at the thing, but here I was still sort of compelled to proceed on this journey, despite a lot of "wait, what is going on?" comments. I enjoyed Fairly's story, and her journey, even though I had no idea what the point of it was. I also really liked the parts where Rowena, from a time hundreds of years removed from our own, is researching and reflecting on this story. In fact, I do wish there was more of that, the parts from the future really intrigued me. (And as several other reviewers have mentioned, navigating the "footnotes from the future" on an eARC format is nearly impossible- I do think it will be more enjoyable in a finished format!)

As I mentioned, Fairly was on a journey. Somewhere. For some reason. Our archivist knows as little as we do, which is a fun perspective. There is a lot of commentary on humanity, and our current time period, which I appreciated. Parts of the story were almost like a puzzle, making me want to figure out what I was missing, and that was enjoyable. Less enjoyable, perhaps, was the shift in points of view- I don't like the switching to begin with, let alone mid-chapter (and in some cases, even mid-sentence) but that is a more personal preference. I think I'd have also liked to have gotten to know Fairly a bit more on a personal level, but maybe that is part of the point- that her journey could be any of ours? Regardless, I doubt I will forget this book any time soon, for it is one of a kind.

Bottom Line: I have to give this one props for being very unique and exploring storytelling in an outside-the-box fashion, while not alienating me from the story. That's pretty impressive, honestly.

2.5 stars

thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a free ebook in exchanged for a free honest review.


i wanted to enjoy this book since i really loved “skyward” by this author and while that book was strange and uniquely different it was interesting throughout and that made me enjoy it a lot.


this book started similarly well… the first 20% or so where interesting, different and while completely unexplained it was still fun in a strange way.

but after that it was just strange and repetitive in what was happening and the story began to become too unexplained and sadly kept going that way.


for me to enjoy a strange book it must either keep my interest with its strangeness and go somewhere with that OR it must somewhere get explained and start to make sense and be less strangely unexplainable.

sadly this book didn’t do either.and so it started to lose me and my interest after 30% when it all just became too strange and no exponential was to be seen.

and while i liked the writing well enough it wasn’t done that fantastically that it carried the book alone.
since there is no real character exploration or building that helps the story along - or a plot that start to make sense at some point… this book was just strange.


overall this book for readers who just want read something utterly unique and don’t mind never learning what’s happening or going on.


if you need more -as i do- i sadly can’t say i recommend this one.

the saddest thing for me about this is, that if anything -from the quest to the cha or the first character somehow got build out more, explained more or just made into something that fit together or had an actual real connection in some way? this could have been great.

the ideas are there the bios up in those first 20% is great….


but as it is it reads like a mess that didn’t want to come together and nobody bothered to even try and see if they could make it work and make it into something better if not great.

I don't know why I was so obsessed with end points. I think I was still imagining that every story had one. [loc. 2021]
Rowena Savalas is seventeen years of age in body, and six hundred and sixty-three in streaming years. She begins a personal project on 7th January 2314, somewhere on the 'reclaimed Jurassic Coast'. Rowena is studying the Age of Riches (basically the 21st century) which is defined as 'an intense and consuming explosion of digital information'. From her vantage point in the calm and rational Age of Curation, she's attempting an analysis of a document called The Dance of the Horned Road, which dates from July 2024. As her reading progresses, and her footnoted annotations reflect her attempts to make sense of its references, it seems increasingly likely that The Dance of the Horned Road does not describe 'our' 2024 -- that it is, in fact, a work of fiction.

The narrator and protagonist of Dance is Fairly, a young woman who goes a-questing, as many have done before her, on the Horned Road. The world in which she lives is part Bronze Age (the stockaded village in which Fairly grew up) and part Space Age (the Spire in Telezon, from the top of which rockets are launched into space). Fairly's quest begins with her pressing a button on a Chain Device, which changes her narrative from third-person to first-person. There will be more Chain Devices: also a camper van, an ominous and persistent Breathing Man, and a plethora of the mysterious cha.

The cha -- small furry animals, possibly reddish, with pointed ears and long back legs -- are the mystery at the heart of this novel. Sometimes (as painted pebbles) they're currency; sometimes they're friends and protectors; sometimes, to Fairly's initial revulsion, they're food. There's a cult that claims they are ancient cosmic deities who will save humanity. There's a woman who claims they are pigs, and fattens them up to be made into bacon and sausages. The cha absolutely fascinated me, to the extent that when I initially started to write this review I remembered them as the focus of the novel.

But I'm not sure that there is a focus, or an explanation, or a conclusion. Rowena's life -- her physical life -- is changed by reading Fairly's document: Fairly's life changes over the course of that document. But is it a journal, or a work of fiction, or something quite other? Rowena says, near the beginning: "I asked myself the same question over and over and over while reading: What does this all mean? I'm beginning to think that's the wrong question to ask." Perhaps by the end of The Dance of the Horned Road -- or by the end of Three Eight One -- the reader will conclude that 'meaning' is not the only, or even the most important, quest(ion) within a story.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review: UK publication date is 16 JAN 2024.

Thank you to Netgalley and Rebellion for the eARC of this!

I had read Whiteley's other sci-fi book so I was intrigued to read this one as well.

It ended up not really being for me. The first quarter of the book I was very intrigued by the language and set up for the story, with dual timelines and footnotes from another character. But the story quickly became repetitive and too laden with implied meaning that I just didn't care anymore.

This book is meant to be allegorical, as we are all own our own journey, just like the main character(s), but it really didn't add any new meaning or context to the journey besides the ever present "cha." Which didn't make much sense to me.

This book was just not my type of weird is what it boils down to. I am sure it works for others, but it didn't for me.

Not a bad read. But a very strange and kind of muddled read. The footnotes were annoying on the kindle, but not sure it would have been easier in physical form. Just too much.

I found most of the story entertaining.

I liked Three Eight One, but wasn't always hugely engaged by it - the first half in particular felt rather meandering at times. The novel is deceptively simple in tone, presented like a fairy story or a parable, with additional notations from a future academic. However, these annotations didn’t always feel successful for me - again, especially in the first half of the book. As the end of the narrative approaches, the novel as a whole begins to feel more insightful. I'm not sure if I’ll revisit this (especially due to the slow first half), although perhaps more intricacies would be revealed on a reread. That said, I continue to be enthralled by Whiteley's work, and will definitely check out what she puts out next - this one just doesn't resonate as strongly as Skyward Inn for me.
3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.