The Vanished Birds
Ratings43
Average rating3.9
Postponed for now. Haven't felt the urge to pick it up in weeks. So I'll get around to finishing this one another time.
Not your usual space opera. Original, solid characters, the story is not full of action and laser fights but takes you by the hand and never lets go.
Enjoyable read. The prose and the plot flowed very nicely from different PoV to another. Liked that the story spanned decades and centuries for some of the characters. The characters were interesting with complexity. The last few chapters lost me a bit. I got what Simon was going for but I think what he was building to took a bit too long and didn't grab me enough. Still the ending was good.
I liked this book a lot, but I do wish that I had read it before The Spear Cuts Through Water since that book refined a lot of the interesting touches in this one and took them farther, with more confidence. I liked the characters and the overall plot, but the big time skips made a lot of it feel sort of distant and I found the third section a bit silly.
This book has two great, intriguing and plot-driven first two chapters. And then it fizzles out into multi-perspective, multiple timelines, too detailed and yet fuzzy studies of characters, whose emotional connections to others is what is driving most of the plot. And yet, the book didn't make me like those characters, nor convinced me their motivations are what should be the focus here. Mainly I was just longing for the straightforward narrative structure of the book's beginning to return.
So much is kept vague (seriously, a drop of blood does it? and who's the ‘kind one'?) for poetic mystery purpose I suppose, but it just annoyed me. Or was I so bored that I missed crucial details?!
The writing is good. This is once again one of those review where I am mad at a book, because it started out good, and then let me down :/
A story about a farming colony that receives a spaceship every 15 years that comes and picks up their produce. Due to the effects of space travel, those on the ship don't see that much time pass in comparison, so each time they return to the planet the people there have aged significantly, which I thought was a pretty neat plot point. Overall it has quite a bittersweet tone but I really enjoyed it! Could be my new favourite sci-fi book.
Not sure how I feel about this one, not sure if it was really just drawn out and a bit on the tedious side at time or I was just not in the right headspace for it. I'm not sure because at time the writing was so strikingly beautiful that I feel I should have loved it. I wonder if my habit of reading fast didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the deeper stuff in this book too, long story short, this is a beautifully written book with compelling characters that spans an eternity and also no time at all and I'm not going to give it a star rating at the moment.
Heart-warming interactions but a plot that leaves you feeling cold and a little bit enraged, heh.
I was inspired to write this review in memory of Jenny (Reading Envy) Colvin.
This is tale told of a thousand years lived and also yet a lunch you may share with your friend tomorrow. The theme of family and what represents family balanced against the capitalistic greed of a future that awaits mankind.
The world building is solid and it is worth a read if you want you sci-fi served up with less violence and more thought and dare I say feels.
#JennyGuyColvin
“There is no assuaging the fear that things end and people leave.”
Wow. I'm not sure how to properly review this, and hope that a simple ‘wow' will convey the feeling I have upon finishing this book.
The story... hm. The story revolves around a boy and his found-family. In this universe where travelling long distances in space is done through jumps and lost time (weeks/months/years) for the crew, Nia Imani crosses paths with a boy whose appearance on a backwater planet was sudden and mysterious. He can't speak, has no memory of how he got there, crash landed and naked in a field. The inhabitants of the planet are unsettled, and send the boy off with Nia to find where he belongs. Where he ends up belonging is...complicated. Within him, his bone, his blood, are secrets that put him and everyone around him at risk, and Nia is tasked with keeping him safe as he comes of age. Things get...complicated.
Interspersed with this story are other points of view from other people important to the overall story. Chief among them is the story of Fumiko Nakajima, starting a thousand years before the time of Nia and the mysterious boy, as she develops space travel, folding space, entire space stations, and all sorts of advances that completely alter the landscape of humans in space. High on her accolades, she thinks she can do no wrong as her story intersects with the story of Nia and the boy.
Let's be frank here – there's no big space battles. No dramatic escapes. No last-second rescue attempts. Nothing here that really could be considered Star Wars material. This is very much a character-driven family story, in hard sci-fi space. But what a story. It is beautiful. It is horrible. It is heartwarming. It is heartwrenching.
Wow.
I eventually gave this book 4 stars but there were large parts of the book where I thought it would be 3. The main story is interesting and engaging but the pace was awfully slow at times and the level of detail some of the back stories were given was a bit much. Saying that, I could see the pay off of all that detail when the threads came together at the end.
Tldr: Beautifully written characters but at times a bit slow
Four stars for the prose, two for the plot. It's very well written, but parts of the book appear to be aiming for magical realism which doesn't gel with the SF element and makes what should be an emotional climax kind of silly. Also, and this might just be because it's a picaresque, I definitely got the vibe that some of the episodes here were existing short stories or other pieces that had been given bit of a rerub to work them into the novel. A few reviews have mentioned Ursula LeGuin, and I have to say that the last part certainly put me in mind of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. It's not as good as that, of course, but very little is. Overall, flawed but promising.
I don't know what I expected when I started The Vanished Birds, but I can tell you that it blew any expectations I did have completely out of the water. This book is beautiful. It's haunting and poignant. This story is filled with scenes that will make your imagination sing, and your eyes tear up. This is the kind of Science Fiction that I missed so very much.
It all begins on a world that is on the fringes of occupied space. One that is spared the colonization of other worlds, and is saturated with tradition. Jimenez makes it obvious early on that this will be a story about how civilization changes over time. How, despite what we cling to, the world is continuously evolving around us. A story about how one tiny thing, in this case a boy who falls out of the sky, can set in motion things that will change everything.
What is so fascinating about this story is that it also bring so the table so many questions about human kind. What depths will we go to in order to further a cause? Are people expendable, if it means progress? When does greed get to a point where it is no longer sustainable? As Nia and her crew navigate the stars, learning more about the mysterious boy who fell into their life as they travel, the story even questions what makes up a family. I can't express enough how deep this story is, and how wonderful it was to sink into.
This story is not going to be for everyone, I know. It's the kind of Science Fiction that is a gorgeous, slow burn. It takes a while to understand the characters, and how they interact with one another. You must be patient as the universe expands, and the terrible/wonderful things that come along with that unfold. If you are patient, you'll be well rewarded. This book too my breath away and I can scarcely believe that it's a debut.
You would think there would be no new and exciting ways to write a sci-fi about time travel these days but this take was just so fresh and interesting! This definitely would have been 5 stars for me if the characters weren't all different versions of the same narcissistic asshole (besides ahro who seemed more like a prop than a person) also part three drastically changed tone and writing style which threw me off.
This is an exceptional debut novel. Simon Jimenez is clearly a skilled storyteller and is an exciting new voice in science fiction. His prose is beautiful and in The Vanished Birds he seamlessly weaves multiple threads into a tightly-plotted tour de force.
The pace is slow, but measured, as each character is given ample time to establish themselves. As we bounce from vignette to vignette and from character to character the plot is always moving forward as the overarching story comes into focus. When the dust settles we're left with a profound and deeply human story told on an epic scale across millennia. I loved it.
See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.