The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

256 pages

English language

Published June 10, 2025

ISBN:: 9781250396068
Goodreads:: 217388049

(1 review)

When a former classmate begs Pleiti for help on behalf of her cousin—who’s up for a prestigious academic position at a rival Jovian university but has been accused of plagiarism on the eve of her defense—Pleiti agrees to investigate the matter.

Even if she has to do it without Mossa, her partner in more ways than one. Even if she’s still reeling from Mossa’s sudden isolation and bewildering rejection.

Yet what appears to be a case of an attempted reputational smearing devolves into something decidedly more dangerous—and possibly deadly.

1 edition

enne📚 reviewed The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

4 stars

I wonder sometimes if too high expectations make me more likely to be disappointed in a book. I feel like the Mossa and Pleiti series should be my jam: it's lesbian scifi detective fiction set on an Oxford-esque Jupiter space habitats. This one was pretty good, but the first book is still my favorite.

The details of the mystery in this book are the most solid of the trilogy, and (in some ways) I like Pleiti getting a chance to try to do some investigating on her own. Unfortunately, the romance angle suffers from acute "please just talk to each other" syndrome where they each worry on their own about what the other is thinking and feeling.

This is also maybe a minor and petty opinion, but it felt like this book over-did loan words from other languages; arguably, in universe this could be part of the academic study of …

I wonder sometimes if too high expectations make me more likely to be disappointed in a book. I feel like the Mossa and Pleiti series should be my jam: it's lesbian scifi detective fiction set on an Oxford-esque Jupiter space habitats. This one was pretty good, but the first book is still my favorite.

The details of the mystery in this book are the most solid of the trilogy, and (in some ways) I like Pleiti getting a chance to try to do some investigating on her own. Unfortunately, the romance angle suffers from acute "please just talk to each other" syndrome where they each worry on their own about what the other is thinking and feeling.

This is also maybe a minor and petty opinion, but it felt like this book over-did loan words from other languages; arguably, in universe this could be part of the academic study of past earth so I can give it a little bit of a pass. However, it feels like a :chart_with_upwards_trend: from the first book which had none (to my poor memory), to the second book with a few, and this third book where it was so frequent as to almost become jarring. I could believe in the adoption of words like chisme or pues or klopt, but ... chiacchierare? chismoseando?