179 pages
Published 2020
Read from March 24 to March 25
Rating: 5 out of 5
This book throws you in at the deep end of its world and its magic, and is all the better for it. Lemberg weaves exposition and conceptual brilliance into their narration with such ease that I immediately let myself go into the dream-logic of cloths woven from change, wanderlust, hope, and death. It all made deep intuitive sense. The magic within this book, within this world, was palpable, hungry, too brilliant to encompass in mere words on the page.
Thrumming beneath and within all of this magic is a statement of resistance, of resilience, of injustices so great that not even the gods could ever fully remedy them. It is a tale of queer hope, loss, fear, joy, ferocity, and endurance. It is a story that repudiates power, repudiates those who would wield that power to stifle change and force conformity, stagnation, conservativism.
Few stories have ever given me this sense of the potential of fantasy as a toolkit for allegorical storytelling; N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became is on this same level, but there aren't many others. We need more stories like this. More tales into which we can weave our own stories in our present bleak inflection point of history.
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