Reviews and Comments

I read this book a few months ago with the #SFFBookClub. The setting and imagery are still haunting me, but I found the writing itself sort of clumsy, to the point that while actually reading it diminished the impact, much of which came later as I digested the ideas of the book.

This is the sort of near-future sci-fi that's really just one fictional innovation away from the world it was written in, and clearly used as a lens to look at ourselves. It follows one very relatable family and their challenges in adapting--and in some ways being unable to adapt--to a wave of fast social change. I identified strongly enough with each of the main characters in some way that each of their crises broke my heart a little.

The ending wrapped things up a little too neatly and I found that particularly disappointing because it broke the easy belieavability of the rest of the book. But the rest was so good that I can't hold it against book or author.

This is a quick, fun read that's full of hackneyed themes but made a welcome palate cleanser between some quite heavy books.

Cresswell is a recovering academic geographer, whose poetry is deeply rooted in appreciation of places, particularly London where he lived at the time he wrote this collection. And yet some of the poems I found the most affecting were about the non-places of airports and travel. All in all a wonderful collection.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and it's the kind of juicy food for thought that I've spent the week since finishing it digesting. Elements of it felt like an homage to The Left Hand of Darkness, but not heavily enough that to get in the way of Griffith having her own story to tell. There's also a big echo of the stories of early European colonies losing people because they either couldn't handle the environment they were trying to colonise or "went native", liking the cultures they were supposed to subjugate better than their own.

It's beautifully written too, but at times some of the human interactions felt implausibly easy. We get the protagonist almost dying a few times, but she seems to settle in to a wholly alien culture quicker & more easily than I've managed moving between countries on one planet. And the resolution at the end of the book feels too convenient.

SFFBookClub

I love how this book takes on heavy themes of racism and ostracism with a light but never insubstantial touch. It also contains the best skewering I've yet to read of Portland/Seattle "right-on" but clueless middle-class white culture. I found the resolution at the end a little too quick, as is common in YA books, but I appreciated how it left more complexity and ambiguity at the end than is usual for YA.

This is a strong second book in the series, which doesn't feel quite as rich as Black Tides but does advance the story nicely and draws Mokoya more fully than she had a chance to be drawn in Black Tides.[return][return]Note that Tor markets this as a co-first book in the series, but I think it's much better to start with The Black Tides of Heaven. I read this with a book club who hadn't all read Black Tides yet, and many of us ended up putting this one aside to read that first, and enjoying this one more after.

A pleasure to come back to Olondria, and good to see more of the cracks in a world that has a dangerously twee surface. This book really felt more like four novellas to me than a single novel, even though they are all about the same events. The use of four distinct storytellers was interesting, but somehow it didn't quite drag me all the way into its world in the way that the one extended fever dream of A Stranger In Olondria did.