A review by chime_detroit
The Birds that Fly at Dusk by Ivana Skye

emotional hopeful mysterious reflective 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? It's complicated

3.75

This book is odd as hell, and one of the psychologically strangest and most divided against itself I’ve read recently. It’s definitely of the category of ‘odd, half-formed, and weaker middle installment of a trilogy’ but in a way that’s extra odd in this series, because the most crucial plot and world building information of the entire series is contained in mostly the last 1/3rd of this book (and in a single throwaway phrase around the mid-point), only after it does its best to bore the audience into dropping it. I’ve heard this is a tactic Umberto Eco employed deliberately, to whittle the readership down to only those who’ve gotten through it, but I doubt it was deliberate here. The weakness is closer to what I’d call ‘boilerplate’ — except for the parts of the book that are absolutely not boilerplate in any way shape or form, and are in fact some of the best writing, of any kind, I’ve ever seen in my life. Are in fact things I’ve never seen stated anywhere else, in any manner. Maybe never in the history of religion. 
 
We open with Eshva, a demon, who is 12 years old. As clarified but not elaborated on in The Stars That Rise At Dawn, demons in Sehhinah are people who were taken from their families as young children by the entity Lilith, who queers the human/inhuman binary by making herself immaterial and immortal due to a never-repeated-again machination of extremely creative Theurgy and interlocking of God’s power. However, the reason children are stolen from their homes and made into demons is to rescue them from abuse and abandonment. No one in Sehhinah quite comments on this — after all, it’s completely normal to them and has been for millennia — but in dialogue with the real world family institution and real world legend of Lilith (and global ubiquitous stories of baby-stealing entities), it ranks as one of the most clever comments I’ve seen in a long time. The fallibility of such a system — placing the power to decide who should be taken from their families or not in the hands of a single woman who lived millennia ago in an age and society totally unlike the current one — is never quite meditated upon either, but in a somewhat odd choice, exploring demonhood and the demon system is not even close to a main subject of this book. 
 
But demons are the main characters. Eshva, the 12 year old demon, does an impressive feat of Theurgy in the prologue, creating a conflagration of electric sparks and arcs around their hand, which increase in intensity the harder they focus on their sense of themself. Immediately afterwards, the joy of this creation and impulse is shattered, as it turns out, which they didn’t anticipate (being 12 and all), that this means they are a walking electrocution hazard, unable to touch anyone without seriously injuring them, and dangerous to be near if they are not dissociating from themself. Quite impressive in the elegance of its horror. 
 
Ten years later, a different demon, from the same region but a different settlement, named Celyet, is 17 (so an adult). Also a gifted Theurgist, she has created a highly realistic creek, only for her fellow demons to bathe in it, unaware that it is her soul, or that it is Theurgy at all. Broken up by this, she flees the camp for the nearby city of Akal-ne. Where, as it turns out, Eshva is working as a coffeeshop barista, having somehow manifested a glove that suppresses their electricity, and rather halfheartedly dating a regular human woman, Yairen, the quietly browbeaten and insecure youngest daughter of a prestigious trading family. Yairen suddenly asks Eshva to teach her Theurgy, bringing up their old trauma in full force. 
 
After a bewildering day of trying to figure out the social systems and bureaucracy of human society, Celyet tries to recover in a coffeeshop — the one Eshva works at. Here comes an odd, long, and fascinatingly tender scene, where Celyet does something that ought to be routine and casual to most people — tries to order a drink at this shop. Somewhat in the vein of Yenatru and Eliya’s strangely and unexpectedly tender interaction over the revealing of Yenatru’s manifestation back in Stars. The pacing slows to a careful, blow-by-blow sequence of emotions and thoughts, turning on Celyet’s exquisite sensitivity, neurodivergence, alienatedness, and terror of being misinterpreted; combined with Eshva’s paranoia, forced distancing of themself, and clumsy desperate kindness. It’s a surprisingly engrossing and intimate sequence of writing, and does a lot of literary work in infusing depth into the first two thirds of the book. This type of scene does not recur in this book, but does to some extent in the third book. 
 
Soon after, this is interrupted by the angel Jibril, who is the owner of the coffeeshop (named “Jibrew”) strolling in. This kind of thing is really a delight of the series. Everyone knew Jibril owned it, but they’d been off-planet for years, and none of the main characters had ever seen them. The over-the-top, ostentatious, and sharply-precise and carefully-considered attention to every detail and design choice of their design is truly magnificent: 
 
 …and there’s places where [the skin] glows, somehow. There’s something shifting under there, almost: for a second Yairēn can almost catch the shape and glow and feel and even slight blueness of a lick of flame under their neck. 
 
 And with a last step—bells, bells—this person’s hair, some shade of light gold and straight, wafts forward, almost over the counter as if drawn there. And Yairēn manages to look up, away from the hair and hand and the fingers coiled against the counter, at moments seeming too to glow, and at their face. 
      That’s a mistake, because she makes eye contact. 
      The eyes are too bright—not glowing, but just bright and sharp and clear in a way that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t seem possible, like when a camera lens is perfectly focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else but Yairēn isn’t looking through a camera, she’s looking through her eyes. And this person’s eyes, some clear and perfectly smooth shade of light orange, are more in focus than just about anything in the world ever seems to be. 
 
 
Jibril immediate starts to talk, and slowly makes everyone, especially Celyet, irritated beyond belief, but with some extremely interesting worldbuilding and cosmological history details for the readers: 
 
“— Still can’t believe They of all people couldn’t imagine how to fix how flaming sad Lucifer was for so long!  A couple of times I even tried to tell Them like, hey girl, I mean not really girl because You have no idea what a gender is, but girl all the same—“
      Something else. Anything else. That river, flowing so gentle. The feel of clay in her fingers. Softness. Softness under her feet…
      “—girl, there are some flaws in how You’ve set things up.  And They were just kind of like, shrugging with Their mirrors and fire like what’s better? I guess I thought that was rhetorical, you know how it is with Them and words, though of course you know me, or you’re getting to know me, so I did try to answer anyway but I guess my thoughts just weren’t as impressive an answer for Them as what Lucifer did, you know how it is with Them and arguments.” 
 
While desperately trying to tune out Jibril’s endless monologuing, Celyet starts focusing on her own soul, her own calm and rich flowing river-ness, and then, by accident, so easy is this for her, she manifests a river of her soul in the middle of the coffeeshop. Theurgy cannot be undone, so now she’s stuck with the horrifying prospect of her soul being permanently and uneradicatably plopped in the middle of a public place of business. Jibril however, persuades her that they will protect it, and her, from disturbance, and hints to her that there’s something unusual about her. 
 
After Eshva and Yairen’s respective personal issues continue, accelerated and fueled by Celyet’s manifestation event that happened before their eyes. Pondering herself makes Yairen dissolve into tears and self-loathing, and pondering Celyet’s beautiful, non-dangerous manifestation makes Eshva stiff with envy and a different type of self-loathing. Eventually that night, Jibril bullies Eshva into taking a trip up to a mountain so that they can ‘chat’ about their issues. This isn’t over any more interesting than the stuff that has been happening since the strange tender magnifying-glass-eye view of the coffee-ordering sequence, but it casually contains a passage that blew me out of my chair: 
 
“Y’know, that sounds pretty ironic, since I’m guessing that’s not your problem, thinking you’re too little. It’s not worth it, you know that, right? Being afraid of yourself, I mean.  Because—do you know why God, maker of Something-out-of-Nothing, stretched themself to the absolute limit to make something not from Their soul, to break the rules of Theurgy more than anyone has since, only possible for Them because Their nature is Something-out-of-nothing—why They, famously lazy, put so much effort into inviting entirely other souls to exist, first the angels and then you humans?  Do you know why?” 
 
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this idea for the creation of people/souls in any other fiction, nor in any jewish or christian or muslim theology or philosophy I’ve read. Things partial and slightly overlapping with this yes, but not this particular combo. Unless it was phrased in so different a manner that I forgot the earlier one and therefore can’t compare it to this. The way it fits in with the worldbuilding of Theurgy is insane. Yet it’s presented quite casually, and responded to without any amazement or confusion — as if society already has a long, surface-level familiarity with the concept, such that people rarely if ever stop to contemplate how astonishingly full of wonder and implications this is.wonder and implications it is. 
 
While this is happening, Yairen decides that she’s too worthless to make anything of herself, and that somehow, a possible way out of this is to become a Holy. Comparing each sentence her thought process and motivations and the entire sequence of her reactions, beliefs, and desires; to Tamar’s in the previous book, is fascinating, right down to the fact Tamar desires to ‘see God’ while Yairen desires to ‘be made Holy’. God makes this one appearance in this book, and it’s to be deeply unimpressed with Yairen’s motivations and refuse her. They make attempts to communicate Their reasoning to her, but a two-fold communication barrier is instantly hit — the difficulty of understanding Their complex, nonverbal communication, and Yairen’s hair-trigger projections and jumping to conclusions that seem to hit every flavor of misinterpretation that Celyet was so afraid of being directed at herself earlier in the book. After a long sequence of meandering, bogged-down attempts at explanation and persuasion, God finally gives up and withdraws in a temper while Yairen explodes in a rage. 
 
And then immediately after this, consumed by panic and suicidality, Yairen decides that the only thing that will calm her down is to bathe in Celyet’s soul. She doesn’t really seem to notice this is almost the same thing as being made a Holy, just as neither Yenatru nor Eliya nor Lucifer ever made the connection between it and the scene of Eliya being kissed by Yenatru’s manifestation. But it’s an incredible description of Celyet’s soul. 
 
The book continues rather normally weaving in between these occasional shockingly intense scenes whose implications go unnoticed by the characters, but setting up a fast-moving, yet natural-feeling polyamorous romance between the three main characters. Until finally, it’s established: these connections are not unnoticed. Jibril has been brewing these connections in their mind for a long long time, maybe centuries, but for some reason has been refusing to announce the idea to the world at large. The answer is, that there are gods besides God. Specifically, some people — mostly normal people, humans, such as Celyet — have souls that, through the logic of Theurgy that has been getting set up in this and previous book, identify them as gods by their nature. This is revealed in two conversations, one where Celyet talks to Lilith, trying to understand what God is and why They are special/supposedly one-of-a-kind: 
 
That sounds almost as if….someone else could have been that first person, and it just happened to be Them who was.  But no, that doesn’t sound quite right.

Is who They are, Celyet asks, because of Their being the first to exist?
 
Lilith considers that with a hum that is also the wind through trees, and then says: Perhaps it is the other way around.
 
So if another existed first, instead of Them. If another… another… like God…? But no, no, it’s not really about who was first. It’s about—about something else— something which could allow one to be the first to exist— 
 
A quality, that God has. 
 
 
And then one between Celyet and Jibril, where Jibril informs Celyet of their theory and the logic behind it. This is the location, finally, of what I mentioned at the beginning of this review — some of the best writing, of any kind, I’ve ever seen in my life. Are in fact things I’ve never seen stated anywhere else, in any manner. Maybe never in the history of religion. 
 
It’s not very informative to excerpt explanatory elements of this second conversation, however, because it’s so tightly bound up, and already pretty much is the minimum amount of explanation required to convey this info — a full chapter, an evocative but still incomplete part chosen at random: 
 
I think you’ll understand when I say that it is possible for a soul not just to be what it is, but to be itself a creation of the conditions for its own existence. And though it is hard to say exactly what makes it so, you seem to do and be this in the very same way that God is the sourceless shining fire that is forever in the act of searing through me.
 
Her heart racing, racing, racing, she reads another sentence, and another.
 
I wonder if the sense of power in you is the same.
 
I wonder if your way of being is the same.
 
She stops to catch her breath. There are implications here, but she cannot believe them. Yes, there is an intensity to her, in all its gentle and soft senses, in the muchness of all she is and has manifest … but what Jibril is implying is plainly impossible.

And yet.

And yet, the impossible opens far too wide and visible in Celyet’s heart. 

She turns back to her square, where more words shine.  God is not a name, they read, and there’s already tears in Celyet’s eyes. Because she knows, she knows, entirely and exactly, in every drop of her soul, where this is going.  Even some commonly-spoken curses mention God’s names, and the implication there is entirely true: God is not the name of God.  Not even one of them.  
 
The final parts of the book need less analysis, since being a middle book, it ends without much being wrapped up, but more open to suspense. 
 
As stated before, this book is really weird. If Stars is geologically layered and full of spurs of different types and densities of rock thrusting through one another, Birds is like huge hunks of pure gold dumped in a lake of concrete. Excavating the gold is not difficult, neither to find nor to dig out, if someone tells you there’s gold in there, but it is basically completely unsignalled and there’s plenty of concrete under and between the hunks of gold too. Like a guilty criminal’s ploy to hide their gold from the cops. 

In particular I don’t understand the character of Eshva. I don’t mean that I don’t understand them as a person — that is entirely understandable and realistic. But as a choice for a written character. Their trauma, their issues, and their arc are as obviously and tritely telegraphed as that of Elsa from the Disney movie Frozen; despite how terrifying the backstory impetus for these in the prologue is. The focus on the surface level, most obvious issue with their manifestation — the danger it poses — is in fact treated as the full problem and analysis of their issues. Not, for example, a thin veneer covering a genuinely deeper issue, like, say, ‘who the hell am I, that such a thing as this is my soul in the first place?’ Yairen is more deep and meaty, but a part of her arc — when Celyet teaches her Theurgy — engages in a similar surface level solution. Her terror is that when she tries to feel her soul, she feels nothing but howling emptiness. Her eventual manifestation winds up being a pair of wings she can fly upon. But the bridge between these is not a clever leaning into this emptiness — perhaps your soul is a howling open gap full of empty air, the necessary conditions for flight — but a more simple ‘no just reach further, and you will find a spark instead of this empty space’, and she does. I bring these specific ideas up because both these deeper hints — the flutter amid emptiness, or the horror of what their manifestation proves about their soul — are present. But unlike in Stars, where the many facets of different angles and possible frames and speculations that Eliya thumbs through about her soul all build and jostle together to form a larger structure, and the less-fraught reflections in Birds of successful Theurgists Celyet and Jibril seem to emphasize that such intricacy is to be expected in all souls, the deeper hints of Eshva and Yairen in Birds feel like they’re competing with much more simple and straightforward explanations. 
 
These takings of a road more well-traveled rather than jumping at the opportunity to dodge it and/or to leapfrog it into a much more interesting and odd psychological thicket are a bit at odds with basically everything else in the series, including all the characters, very much including Celyet and Jibril. None of this was handled or written poorly, but it felt strange and almost feint-like coming from this author, to spend so much time on such trope- and genre-conforming storylines. It also felt less psychologically interesting and revealing than any of the uncomfortably wrestling twisting and turning characterization in Stars coming from the author struggling to let her ideas exist. Or for that matter, in the character of Celyet. Perhaps there was some extent to which Celyet and Jibril are the clear core characters of the main thematic point of the book, but either holding to this extremely tiny cast, or expanding the cast to strange peripheral characters that appear in the book only briefly, like Tan Coat Guy and his unnamed sister, or young children, or Lilith, was not in the cards for this series’ unusualness at the time of writing. 
 
Speaking of Lilith, I was somewhat let down by how non-central to the plot the demon system and its impact on society and theological place in the world was. It means that demons remain one of the most significant loose ends to the worldbuilding; the other one being the history of this world and the evolution of its society over the many millennia of theologically ‘status-quo’ development. Neither of these are exactly essential for the core arc of the series or its fulfillment in the final book, but elaboration on them would have likely made a better use of middle-book pagecount than a couple of the supporting character arcs that those pages were spent on instead.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings