R. B. Lemberg

This was a collection where I took no notes, not because nothing moved me, but because all of it did, the entire thing at once. And it is all so personal to the author, a sort of memory in poetic form, that it felt false to pick out lines or even poems that I identified with or felt some type of way about. It was all their life, and it was made up of so many elements, so far removed from me — immigration after immigration, gulag, legacies of war and ethnic cleansing, parents locked in their grief, estrangement after estrangement.

Even the theme here, Everything Thaws, is less a cause for hope than for another kind of grieving — that which you thought was permanent will also melt away.

I could not put this down. It felt important to bear witness to, and to think about the harms we pass down generations when we don't have the space, tools, or sometimes the inclination to unlearn them. In the end there is not so much joy as there is a new, chosen community, the determination to do better when they can.

And to not be silent.… (meer)

I had been intending to read this book forever and it was long past time I finally got to it. If you look at the reviews for this, it seems people either really love it or are frustrated and have a hard time getting into it. Somehow I did both. In the early chapters, it felt like this book kept bouncing off of my brain somehow. I struggled to keep the two narrators straight. I struggled to feel like I understood them. Was I just tired? Was my brain too full of other stories? But I kept going and in the end the resolution was SO satisfying as to soothe all my earlier frustrations.

Both narrators are older, and they start on a path that has them rushing headlong into confronting their greatest disappointments in life. For Uizaya, it is that her aunt never taught her all of the Four Profound Weaves, that she never mastered this form of artistry/magic. For the second narrator, who goes by "nameless man" for the first section of the novel, it is that despite knowing himself to be a man all his life, he did not undergo the magic to change his body until so late in life, after both of his lovers were dead, and until the ways of living as a man in the highly gendered culture he was raised in were all long closed to him. There is magic and desert life and diverse cultures rubbing against each other and a despot and resistance.

Took a while to click for me, but once it did I really loved it!… (meer)

I really love the world building and some of the ideas explored in this story. I'm a little less sold on the characters, who I found a little too uncanny valley (and I don't think that this is because some of them are neurodiverse), and who didn't seem to really interact with each other in a plausible manner.

The writing is good, and the magic system well integrated. The belief system was mostly fine -- there was obviously a lot of thought there, and things like the way that the language reflected it was great--but I didn't feel like I quite understood the relationship between the people and their faith. Where the whole story fell down for me is that I didn't find the people, their behaviour, or their motivations convincing. I think it would have been a great play or film, but it didn't work for me as a novel.… (meer)