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A review by tiltingwindward
The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
5.0
This is a beautiful book, I feel lucky to have read it, and I'm so grateful that Sofia Samatar shares her gifts with us. It's definitely a book that requires *work* - emotional work, imaginative work, and a serious time commitment. I found it hard to read unless I was able to devote at least half an hour to sit down with it; anything less was insufficient to immerse myself in the story and the language to the degree this book demands. But it's absolutely worth it.
If you haven't read A STRANGER IN OLONDRIA, you don't have to do so before you read THE WINGED HISTORIES. It will help, but these are standalones - or rather, STRANGER is a story that runs through the middle of HISTORIES, and the HISTORIES surround the trajectory of STRANGER in a nebulous cloud of creation and reaction. It's about war and the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are (as individuals, as nations); it's about memory and story; it's about who gets to be in the story at all and whether they get to speak in their own voice; it's about empire and also about love and a whole lot about how people handle loneliness. Having read it, it's easy to forget that Kestenya and the Balinfeil and the Valley aren't real places in our world.
You'll love this book if you like stories told from different perspectives, if you like stories that spend as much time thinking about what it means to be a society as they do on action, if you like war stories that don't glorify war, and if you love dreamy but precise writing where you can always feel the weather exactly right. (For the very small contingent of people who read and loved CASTLEDOWN as children, this feels in some ways like an adult cousin of that.)
You probably won't love this book as much if you don't like stories that move slowly, if you don't like to spend a lot of time looking at the map, if you want exposition to tell you what's going on clearly, or if you want your stories to proceed in a linear fashion. On the other hand, if you don't like some of these things but *do* love stories that feature the internal life of the POV characters, I'd encourage you to give this beautiful book a try.
If you haven't read A STRANGER IN OLONDRIA, you don't have to do so before you read THE WINGED HISTORIES. It will help, but these are standalones - or rather, STRANGER is a story that runs through the middle of HISTORIES, and the HISTORIES surround the trajectory of STRANGER in a nebulous cloud of creation and reaction. It's about war and the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are (as individuals, as nations); it's about memory and story; it's about who gets to be in the story at all and whether they get to speak in their own voice; it's about empire and also about love and a whole lot about how people handle loneliness. Having read it, it's easy to forget that Kestenya and the Balinfeil and the Valley aren't real places in our world.
You'll love this book if you like stories told from different perspectives, if you like stories that spend as much time thinking about what it means to be a society as they do on action, if you like war stories that don't glorify war, and if you love dreamy but precise writing where you can always feel the weather exactly right. (For the very small contingent of people who read and loved CASTLEDOWN as children, this feels in some ways like an adult cousin of that.)
You probably won't love this book as much if you don't like stories that move slowly, if you don't like to spend a lot of time looking at the map, if you want exposition to tell you what's going on clearly, or if you want your stories to proceed in a linear fashion. On the other hand, if you don't like some of these things but *do* love stories that feature the internal life of the POV characters, I'd encourage you to give this beautiful book a try.