This book is a slow start but the momentum builds quickly to a startling and wrenching finish. Sofia Samatar is an AMAZING writer. Like, her prose is gorgeous and will wreck you and create an image that you will be haunted by long after you've put the book down. I think her choice of four female narrators throughout civil unrest was a smart choice, as it demonstrates the effects of war on women civilians. The narrative polyphony is broken up into four books, so you don't have to try and identify which woman is speaking. That said, this novel reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, which is all about mourning the loss of something or someone.

Many thanks to my sister, who gave this a rave review. I think this is a contender for best book I've read this year. ( )

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. ( )

A beautiful, lyrical, intensely moving book. I can't lavish enough praise on this. Has already joined my "frequent re-read" shelf.

Chicago Nerds discussion notes: http://positronchicago.blogspot.com/2016/09/chicago-nerds-winged-histories.html ( )

Read 2016, favourite. ( )

This one is extremely difficult to review, mainly because I'm tempted more to appreciate it from afar rather than enjoy it up close. But there are passages where the reverse is entirely as true.

Whereas the first novel was a straightforward love of literature and myth made up out of whole cloth and full of love of the act of writing, itself, among so many who refuse to read, the sequel is nothing less than a shattered land following the events that led to war in the first, and not only shattered by war, but also as shattered in prose.

You see? I can appreciate the book's structure, it's sheer reliance on poetry and despair and song, (oh, especially song,) to convey a feeling, or a string of many layered and complex feelings and subjects, in the face of kings and monsters, family and one's love-life, of which there is quite a bit of LGBT, and quite beautifully done.

So much is either dense world-building in terms of myth, historical rumination, straight stream-of-consciousness. Only occasionally do we have a bit of traditional storytelling, and more often than not, there's stories within stories.

That's what I love.

What I didn't love so much was the lack of attention-grabbing plot among the wonderful prose, or, as the case may be, the sad fact that I lost interest. Multiple times. That's not to say that certain characters keep showing up to provide threads I can hold on to, or to see how each of them change and develop over time, or how their perceptions of love or singing give them perspective on their identities, but these gems were buried fairly deep in the labyrinth of the prose and often it was a real chore to pay attention.

I sometimes like to work for my read, it's true. But I want to feel like I'm going to get something really wonderful out of the challenge, too, and while this was all pretty wonderful poetry, I'm not sure it spoke to me as a whole.

There were certain parts, such as the love story and the songs that really got me, but the rest of the book was kind of a let down

At least in comparison to the previous one. ( )