Review: Other Evolutions - Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Genre: Contemporary Fiction with Speculative element

Published: ECW-Press, October 2025

My Rating: 4/5 stars

“If I were to tell someone the story of my life, I wouldn’t start with my birth. I wouldn’t start with the birth of my parents either, or their parents, or their parents, whose names have been lost to me, are as untouchable, as untraceable, as if they never lived. I would start the story of my life with the birth of my older sister. I would start with Marnie.”

Other Evolutions is a literary family-story with a speculative twist, about sibling relationships, identity and belonging (either to a place, a people or a person). We follow Alma, the youngest daughter of a Jewish-Mexican family in Ottawa, throughout the course of her life in the wake of a tragedy that rocks her family forever. A sibling conflict leads to a car-accident that costs a boy his life and Alma an arm. Building up to this moment, and following the fallout in chronological order, Other Evolutions captures a portrait of a sliced open life, and a sister-dynamic weighed down by guilt and resentment over inequality.

What I loved:

If you enjoy a good (generations) modern family-tragedy with complex and well-developed sibling-dynamics; there’s plenty to love here. Rebecca Hirsch Garcia does an exceptional job of placing a set of realistic and relatable characters in a conflict-situation that realistically has no villains or heroes, but only victims. The characters and their emotions towards themselves and each other felt multilayered and complex, and went a long way to getting me invested into their narratives.

The story itself is divided in 4 parts, of which the first 3 felt beautifully paced. There’s a sense of gradual build-up towards an inevitable tragedy, with plenty of time to spare after the event to focus on the fallout of it. The final part falls a little out of step with that pacing (more on that in the next section), but does introduce an interesting thought-experiment. If you know my reading-tastes, you know I love my modern Frankenstein-inspired stories with themes of science-vs-humanity, hybridity and creation, and where they intersect with culture, disability and bodily autonomy. This story offers a lot of food for thought in that regard, even though I’m not quite sure if I think the author explored them fully enough for my taste.

Bonuspoints to the cover-artists, who created a stunning visual that definitely helped to draw my attention to this book.

What I didn’t love:

Although I enjoyed this novel, it can’t say that it met my expectations, particularly when it comes to genre and tone. Both the publisher and Goodreads categorize this as “Speculative/Sci-fi”. The issue is that the speculative element only appears about 80% through the story, and everything up until that point has read as a contemporary fiction story. As a result, the final part of the book threw me off balance a bit, as the speculative element felt out of place and hastily tacked on. To make matters worse, it felt largely inconsequential, as it could’ve achieved the same (emotional) arc without this element.

There were two potential solutions to this strange genre-switch: either cut the speculative element completely (which, again: I don’t think would’ve made too much of a difference for the core of the story), or introduce/foreshadow it far earlier in the story. Regardless, it would’ve been more consistent than the way it was handled in the current form.

Overall, I’d recommend this book, as long as you go in with the correct expectations. Some edits to the blurb and marketing, with a lesser focus on the sci-fi-elements might help to better represent the book and get it into the hands of the correct audience.

Many thanks to ECW Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.