fruitcd 's review for:

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

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This is a story about stories, which I think can sometimes come off as very trite to me, but this worked for me well enough. It's really focused around two characters, Jevick and Jissavet-- Jevick is the rich young son of an islander pepper merchant trying to enter the mainland society he admires, and Jissavet is a young girl afflicted with a stigmatized disease who briefly crosses paths with Jevick before dying. Jevick's story was all about the power of narrative, history, and writing, and Jissavet's story was all about living in hellish, horrible circumstances and still finding rare moments of beauty and joy. There were little things about each character's arc that bothered me but overall, I did enjoy this book. Really beautiful prose (although it did Insist Upon Itself at times) and wonderfully done worldbuilding. This world felt so dense and rich and lived-in. It reminded me at times of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, with two characters going on a perilous journey together, interspersed with a lot of myths and histories that helped build out the world they were traveling through. 

I think what frustrated me about this book was that Jevick was quite a passive character. He just did things that other people wanted him to, and his major character development in this book was, again, doing what someone else wanted him to do. Even in the end, Jevick's return to Tyom is mostly him acting as a messenger and carrying someone else's story along (bringing

Tialon's letters to Lunre

and

Jissaveck's vallon and system of writing to the islands

) rather than really feeling like he is living his own story. The end of his arc sees him

becoming a tchavi and leaving his family behind for a life of wandering and teaching

, but why? Because he essentially

fell in love with a ghost?

I just didn't necessarily emotionally believe it-- his depth of emotion towards her felt not entirely earned. In TLHOD, Genly's character development and the state he's in at the end of the book is completely believable and emotionally resonant because we see over the course of the book how the development of his friendship with Estraven has totally changed his life. Jissavet and Jevick meet only briefly and their relationship develops only after she dies. For 90% of the book she's simply hounding him to tell her story and he's ignoring her. Jevick's relationships with other side characters like Auram and Miros were interesting, but seemed to just peter out at the end when he finally accepted Jissavet's task. 

The title of this book and much of the beginning is about being a "stranger," a foreigner. Jevick is from an island nation and faces prejudice when he travels to the mainland, and whenever someone assumes he's a "savage" he merely gets defensive on his own behalf and assures them he's had an Olondrian education, not that his homeland isn't a savage nation. I thought this was going to be a much bigger theme, but it ends up mostly being dropped in favor of the more general themes of narrative and storytelling. Jevick returns home without really developing any sense of national identity or pride. He does

create a written alphabet for one of the island nations, but that was really for Jissavet rather than for national or altruistic reasons.

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed this book and it gave me a lot to chew on. I have to give props to a book that makes me basically want to immediately reread it (and reread The Left Hand of Darkness while I'm at it).