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batesbarb's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
This is an absolutely beautiful book. Samatar's skill with words honestly feels a little unfair. The prose is lush and enveloping, but I found it difficult to connect to the story itself. It's been 5 years or more since I read A Stranger in Olondria, and I had a terrible time trying to keep track of the various nations and factions and how they related to each other. I kept forgetting who was fighting who and who was fomenting rebellion where. Perhaps if I had read Stranger more recently, I would have felt less lost.
The rotating narrator construction really allowed Samatar to show her skill at voice and tone (the sections have beautifully distinct tones and focuses, so that even the ostensibly third-person sections have a very clear source and it is obvious they are centered around different women), but it undercut what momentum the story built. As soon as I felt like I had even a basic grasp on the structure of the world and the people in it, the story would move to a different woman, and I'd have to start all over again figuring out who anyone was and how they related to each other. The first two viewpoint characters were the most distant and least connected, which I think amplified the problem for me.
All in all, my feelings about the book are quite muddled. I kept moving back and forth between being absorbed and enticed by the beautiful prose, and frustrated and alienated because I couldn't keep track of or connect to the actual people and events of the story.
The rotating narrator construction really allowed Samatar to show her skill at voice and tone (the sections have beautifully distinct tones and focuses, so that even the ostensibly third-person sections have a very clear source and it is obvious they are centered around different women), but it undercut what momentum the story built. As soon as I felt like I had even a basic grasp on the structure of the world and the people in it, the story would move to a different woman, and I'd have to start all over again figuring out who anyone was and how they related to each other. The first two viewpoint characters were the most distant and least connected, which I think amplified the problem for me.
All in all, my feelings about the book are quite muddled. I kept moving back and forth between being absorbed and enticed by the beautiful prose, and frustrated and alienated because I couldn't keep track of or connect to the actual people and events of the story.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death and Religious bigotry
Moderate: Emotional abuse and Colonisation
charlotekerstenauthor's review
"Your body remembers war. This body I love. War has shaped the beloved body."
So What's It About?
Civil war has come to Olondria. In The Winged Histories we see what this war means to four women, drastically different yet alike in that their lives are shaken to the core by the chaos in their land. Tav dreams of being a swordmaiden, and she is one of the first to whisper of rebellion. Tialon reflects on a life wasted by the oppressive restrictions of her father's religion. Seren sings of her love for Tav and the cycles of life that she sees unfold all around her, and Siski learns to face what she left behind after a life of empty frivolity.
What I Thought- The F Word
If I hadn't been entirely convinced by the end of A Stranger in Olondria, I would now be entirely positive: Sofia Samatar has won my heart for life. In short, this is a beautiful, stunningly-written little marvel of a book, strange and sorrowful and full of heart-aching loveliness. I'm sure I can't say anything about Samatar's prose that hasn't been said more eloquently by someone else, but I've never read anyone who writes quite as deliberately yet fearlessly, in a way that is at once finely-tuned and effortlessly graceful.
This is a book about war and its nation-spanning consequences and ugliness. It speaks to the cycles of oppression and rebellion that are doomed to repeat again and again, belief and tradition and fear. At its heart I think it is more than anything a story of women's resistance, and the many diverse, complex forms that this female resistance may take.
Tav's resistance is expressed when she runs away to become a swordmaiden, and again when she helps incite the Kestenyan rebellion against Olondria. It is perhaps the most literal form of resistance, but Samatar would not be satisfied with her readers calling Tav a hero and moving along to the next story. We see the ugly, horrible repercussions of her actions - both for herself in the form of PTSD and slow healing from her suffering as a soldier and for the nation as a whole in the damage that is wrought by the conflict. It's a wonderfully nuanced undoing of the fighter girl trope, where strength is equated with a woman's ability to engage in traditionally masculine forms of violence.
"It was the beginning of the dance of the mountains."
Tialon's resistance comes in the tiniest and strangest forms as she lives a tiny and overwhelmingly restrictive life under the dark, repressive influence of her father's obsessive religion. The atmosphere of stillness, boredom and repression is absolutely stifling in this portion of the book, and we see the way that zealous devotion to religion stripped Tialon's father of all his joy in life, kindness and affection for others. Tialon was a character in A Stranger in Olondria, and her aid to Jevick is revealed as one of the only things she considers being meaningful in the entirety of her life.
"The priest’s daughter read about the life that was going on in the palace. She drew pictures under the beam of her single candle, pictures of ladies and gentlemen walking and dancing and sitting down to meals at elegant tables. She knew all the styles of dress, how bodices changed from year to year, the fashions of hairpins, and whether the gentlemen were wearing their hair short or long, and sometimes she drew herself in the midst of the dancers, in a light carmine frock with a necklace of tourmalines and Evmeni pearls. She read the geographers, Elathuid the Voyager, Firdred of Bain, and she drew herself aboard ships, in hotels, in tents, on the pinnacles of mountains, and then sometimes in cities, in little parlors, among cousins, in the garden of an aunt who passed her an ice decorated with pink dust. She had to imagine the colors, as she possessed only charcoal. She drew in a frenzy of self-loathing and a sick, irresistible craving. Sometimes she made herself eat the charcoal as a sort of penance and vomited ecstatically over the balcony. At dawn the sky was so clear and almost green. And she felt bright and light. She always burned the drawings before she left her room. "
Seren's resistance comes in the form of her insistence upon the necessity of "new songs." Living with her nomadic people and learning to spread ideas through song, she sees the way that her people are limited by their notions of gender and sexuality. One of the most interesting parts of the book was the treatment of lesbianism by Seren's people: they see it as something that is acceptable in little children, but any women who continues to love women into adulthood simply need to grow up. Ultimately, this belittlement and judgment leads Seren and Tav to strike off on their own into the wilderness, and leads to Seren's conclusion that there need to be new songs.
"The men are going to war and the women are spinning. The women are spinning and the men are going to war. The men are going to war for the women. The women are singing the men to war. The men’s hearts grow hot and sharp as blades from the singing of the women. The women are memory. They are the memory of men, of those who have died. The men sing of the fallen and the women keep their songs and memories alive. The women spin threads that never break. The women are spinning shrouds. All the men and women are singing themselves to death."
Siski's resistance comes in the form of her survival through the war and its aftermath, having lost all the trappings of her frivolous life as a socialite. There are so many fascinating components of Siski's story - from the misery of her and Tav's childhood home due to her father's rapidly-changing moods to the strange, horrible supernatural truth that she turns her back on when she is a teenager. Ultimately, her story is one of running and running from that horror and trying to lose herself in the pleasures of life, but ultimately being unable to keep running from her heart and what she owes to the man she loves.
"By all the gods, had you turned into a dragon in front of me, I would have perished in fire before I ran away."
So What's It About?
Civil war has come to Olondria. In The Winged Histories we see what this war means to four women, drastically different yet alike in that their lives are shaken to the core by the chaos in their land. Tav dreams of being a swordmaiden, and she is one of the first to whisper of rebellion. Tialon reflects on a life wasted by the oppressive restrictions of her father's religion. Seren sings of her love for Tav and the cycles of life that she sees unfold all around her, and Siski learns to face what she left behind after a life of empty frivolity.
What I Thought- The F Word
If I hadn't been entirely convinced by the end of A Stranger in Olondria, I would now be entirely positive: Sofia Samatar has won my heart for life. In short, this is a beautiful, stunningly-written little marvel of a book, strange and sorrowful and full of heart-aching loveliness. I'm sure I can't say anything about Samatar's prose that hasn't been said more eloquently by someone else, but I've never read anyone who writes quite as deliberately yet fearlessly, in a way that is at once finely-tuned and effortlessly graceful.
This is a book about war and its nation-spanning consequences and ugliness. It speaks to the cycles of oppression and rebellion that are doomed to repeat again and again, belief and tradition and fear. At its heart I think it is more than anything a story of women's resistance, and the many diverse, complex forms that this female resistance may take.
Tav's resistance is expressed when she runs away to become a swordmaiden, and again when she helps incite the Kestenyan rebellion against Olondria. It is perhaps the most literal form of resistance, but Samatar would not be satisfied with her readers calling Tav a hero and moving along to the next story. We see the ugly, horrible repercussions of her actions - both for herself in the form of PTSD and slow healing from her suffering as a soldier and for the nation as a whole in the damage that is wrought by the conflict. It's a wonderfully nuanced undoing of the fighter girl trope, where strength is equated with a woman's ability to engage in traditionally masculine forms of violence.
"It was the beginning of the dance of the mountains."
Tialon's resistance comes in the tiniest and strangest forms as she lives a tiny and overwhelmingly restrictive life under the dark, repressive influence of her father's obsessive religion. The atmosphere of stillness, boredom and repression is absolutely stifling in this portion of the book, and we see the way that zealous devotion to religion stripped Tialon's father of all his joy in life, kindness and affection for others. Tialon was a character in A Stranger in Olondria, and her aid to Jevick is revealed as one of the only things she considers being meaningful in the entirety of her life.
"The priest’s daughter read about the life that was going on in the palace. She drew pictures under the beam of her single candle, pictures of ladies and gentlemen walking and dancing and sitting down to meals at elegant tables. She knew all the styles of dress, how bodices changed from year to year, the fashions of hairpins, and whether the gentlemen were wearing their hair short or long, and sometimes she drew herself in the midst of the dancers, in a light carmine frock with a necklace of tourmalines and Evmeni pearls. She read the geographers, Elathuid the Voyager, Firdred of Bain, and she drew herself aboard ships, in hotels, in tents, on the pinnacles of mountains, and then sometimes in cities, in little parlors, among cousins, in the garden of an aunt who passed her an ice decorated with pink dust. She had to imagine the colors, as she possessed only charcoal. She drew in a frenzy of self-loathing and a sick, irresistible craving. Sometimes she made herself eat the charcoal as a sort of penance and vomited ecstatically over the balcony. At dawn the sky was so clear and almost green. And she felt bright and light. She always burned the drawings before she left her room. "
Seren's resistance comes in the form of her insistence upon the necessity of "new songs." Living with her nomadic people and learning to spread ideas through song, she sees the way that her people are limited by their notions of gender and sexuality. One of the most interesting parts of the book was the treatment of lesbianism by Seren's people: they see it as something that is acceptable in little children, but any women who continues to love women into adulthood simply need to grow up. Ultimately, this belittlement and judgment leads Seren and Tav to strike off on their own into the wilderness, and leads to Seren's conclusion that there need to be new songs.
"The men are going to war and the women are spinning. The women are spinning and the men are going to war. The men are going to war for the women. The women are singing the men to war. The men’s hearts grow hot and sharp as blades from the singing of the women. The women are memory. They are the memory of men, of those who have died. The men sing of the fallen and the women keep their songs and memories alive. The women spin threads that never break. The women are spinning shrouds. All the men and women are singing themselves to death."
Siski's resistance comes in the form of her survival through the war and its aftermath, having lost all the trappings of her frivolous life as a socialite. There are so many fascinating components of Siski's story - from the misery of her and Tav's childhood home due to her father's rapidly-changing moods to the strange, horrible supernatural truth that she turns her back on when she is a teenager. Ultimately, her story is one of running and running from that horror and trying to lose herself in the pleasures of life, but ultimately being unable to keep running from her heart and what she owes to the man she loves.
"By all the gods, had you turned into a dragon in front of me, I would have perished in fire before I ran away."
lauranoonz's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.75
foggy_rosamund's review
4.0
The four parts of this novel are each told by a different woman. Their narratives interconnect, and sometimes directly interact with one another, but they each give a different perspective on one subject: civil war in the imaginary country of Olondria. The novel deliberately shows us the perspective of different women in a mainly patriarchal society so that it can ask the reader to consider women's role in war and in written history in our own world.
I reread this book's companion, "A Stranger in Olondria", shortly before I read this, so I couldn't help making comparisons. I do not think it is necessary to read one of these books first, because they tell different stories, though they occur around the same time. One of the strongest sections in "A Stronger in Olondria", is told from the perspective of Jissavet, an illiterate woman far from her home, who tells her own story to the protagonist of the novel. The writing of her section is vivid, full of details, and elliptical, wandering back and forth between moments of Jissavet's life that she found particularly vital or charged. This section is immersive and compelling. The majority of "The Winged Histories" is written in exactly this style: full of details of vivid memories that evoke the feelings of loss, full of repeated words and themes. It wanders away from the story into the protagonists' memories and pasts, and returns us to the narrative feeling their loss and nostalgia. Writing this intense must be very hard to sustain, but for the most part, I felt it worked. From time to time I felt Samatar gave too many repetitions or wandered too far, but generally I was hooked.
Samatar is not overly concerned with plot. We hear about most of the events only as they are reported. The main characters frequently are not there for them, or observe them from a distance. Again, I feel this is deliberate: women are frequently denied a place at the forefront of the action, and so are left wondering, and desperate for news. However, at times Samatar does have female characters at the centre of action, but at these times she usually doesn't write their story directly but against tells it after the fact, which can be frustrating for the reader and made me feel that her characters are sometimes denied agency.
The lack of plot, however, didn't impact on my engagement with this book much at all. Each character, and their personal history, is richly drawn and given space. We see Seren, the nomad, and learn about her people's culture and song, and we meet Tav, the soldier, and we watch as they learn to love one another. Then we have Siski, socialite and lover of the king, who gets just as much narrative space as more dynamic characters, and whose inner world is wonderfully rendered by Samatar. Perhaps the most difficult character is Tialon, whose father was the powerful Priest of the Stone, and who has been deemed a heretic during the civil war. Tialon's narrative takes place while she is locked in her room by soldiers, and when she is powerless. But she has been powerless for most of her life, and we see her grapple with her lack of agency, and her longing for some form of kindness. She is given hope of a happy ending, and this, Samatar's refusal to abandon her characters to grief, is something I found winning and almost revolutionary.
These two novels could be compared with Borges at his best, or Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities". They are told in gripping, original prose, that should remain part of our literature for a long time, and even when Samatar's prose fails to do what she wants, it is still interesting and worthwhile. I would recommend both these books without question.
I reread this book's companion, "A Stranger in Olondria", shortly before I read this, so I couldn't help making comparisons. I do not think it is necessary to read one of these books first, because they tell different stories, though they occur around the same time. One of the strongest sections in "A Stronger in Olondria", is told from the perspective of Jissavet, an illiterate woman far from her home, who tells her own story to the protagonist of the novel. The writing of her section is vivid, full of details, and elliptical, wandering back and forth between moments of Jissavet's life that she found particularly vital or charged. This section is immersive and compelling. The majority of "The Winged Histories" is written in exactly this style: full of details of vivid memories that evoke the feelings of loss, full of repeated words and themes. It wanders away from the story into the protagonists' memories and pasts, and returns us to the narrative feeling their loss and nostalgia. Writing this intense must be very hard to sustain, but for the most part, I felt it worked. From time to time I felt Samatar gave too many repetitions or wandered too far, but generally I was hooked.
Samatar is not overly concerned with plot. We hear about most of the events only as they are reported. The main characters frequently are not there for them, or observe them from a distance. Again, I feel this is deliberate: women are frequently denied a place at the forefront of the action, and so are left wondering, and desperate for news. However, at times Samatar does have female characters at the centre of action, but at these times she usually doesn't write their story directly but against tells it after the fact, which can be frustrating for the reader and made me feel that her characters are sometimes denied agency.
The lack of plot, however, didn't impact on my engagement with this book much at all. Each character, and their personal history, is richly drawn and given space. We see Seren, the nomad, and learn about her people's culture and song, and we meet Tav, the soldier, and we watch as they learn to love one another. Then we have Siski, socialite and lover of the king, who gets just as much narrative space as more dynamic characters, and whose inner world is wonderfully rendered by Samatar. Perhaps the most difficult character is Tialon, whose father was the powerful Priest of the Stone, and who has been deemed a heretic during the civil war. Tialon's narrative takes place while she is locked in her room by soldiers, and when she is powerless. But she has been powerless for most of her life, and we see her grapple with her lack of agency, and her longing for some form of kindness. She is given hope of a happy ending, and this, Samatar's refusal to abandon her characters to grief, is something I found winning and almost revolutionary.
These two novels could be compared with Borges at his best, or Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities". They are told in gripping, original prose, that should remain part of our literature for a long time, and even when Samatar's prose fails to do what she wants, it is still interesting and worthwhile. I would recommend both these books without question.
lanid's review
adventurous
emotional
reflective
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence, War, Gore, Animal death, Body horror, Death, Emotional abuse, and Xenophobia
Minor: Lesbophobia, Hate crime, and Religious bigotry
senqin's review
5.0
But those on the border write no histories. Their book is memory. Their element is air.
★★★★★
If there's any book that should to be called a work of art it's this one. The Winged Histories deserves 5 stars just because of the sheer beauty of the first three parts in particular: The History of the Sword, The History of the Stone, and the History of Music. Sadly though I did not like the book's concluding section, The History of Flight, for several reasons that I'm attempting to sort out, and the ending was a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise perfect book. Regardless, I think that Sofia Samatar is brilliant and a VASTLY underrated author whose works should be more widely regarded. Even rereading this years later, her writing is still some of the most gorgeous I've ever read. There's a deep sense of poeticism and loss that just permeates throughout the lives of these women she's created. I remain in awe.
— ♩♫♩ ~ Epilogue
kyirrin's review
4.0
Truly lovely prose - I liked how each of the four women felt so different, had distinct voices. The overall book was, hm, hard to describe? A little confusing? The first history, with Tavis, just throws you into this extremely complex world, in the middle of a war and perhaps a rebellion. More of the politics are explained later, but at first everything is moving so fast. Tavis' account feels more like a brief and dazed description of her grim experience as a soldier, and recovery afterwards. I still thought the overall politics and such were confusing, though to be fair they did not feel like the focus of the novel, instead being a background against which to tell the stories of these four women. Three of the four are intimately connected to each other, but still I thought the overall story was maybe disjointed or odd... it felt very literary/complex? I was excited for the last story, Siski's, to find out what happened with her and Dasya (I was sure it was something horrible, but no), and what would happen to them next. I liked Siski's story, desperately trying to escape from knowing Dasya's secret into the shallow life of a socialite, and finally returning and waiting with him until the end, and at the end Dasya in her place making a different choice than she did (I think?). However, I thought the romance (?) between them was a little weird, and I wasn't sure what to think about the Dreved (?).
jnelsontwo's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
jerseygrrrl's review
3.0
I'm also admitting that I'm not going to finish this book. I bought it because one of my favorite authors, NK Jemisin, gave it a rave review. And, indeed, there's much to like here. It's just not my style. The language is so elegant, beautiful, artistic that it slows down the reading. I like some good poetry, but I also like a plot that moves. I didn't find that here. I suspect word lovers will enjoy this book.