This book is a strange little collection of artwork by the author’s brother a practicing tattoo artist and captions and sparse narrative by the author, coupled with additional quotes and passages from other texts. One thing I learned from this whole experience is that Sofia Samatar works at James Madison University, where I went to school, and so I went on a journey back through my department’s old website and seeing who’s still around. None of that has anything to do with the book. The […]
“One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.”
One of things that I love about Goodreads is that it helps you discover sequels that you never knew existed. When I logged my review of Neverwhere a couple weeks ago, Goodreads called it Neverwhere (London Below, The World of Neverwhere), indicating that other stories must exist in the series! In this instance, it referred to a short story called How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Google told me it was published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, so…here we are! While the story of […]
An early contender for Best Book of 2016
You know how there are those books that build slowly, crawl under your skin, and leave you breathless at the end? The books that leave you breathless and drunk, so that when you close them, you feel disoriented, hungover, and bereft all at once? This is that book. I know, it’s a bold claim to make, but I strongly feel that this is a contender for Best Book of 2016. The Winged Histories is comprised of four books, each narrated by a different woman: Tavis, […]
Sofia Samatar’s first novel.
My sister read Sofia Samatar’s second book, The Winged History, and raved about it. I decided to read it, and then also determined to read the book that came first, A Stranger in Olondria. As it turns out, I didn’t really need to do so, since the novels are fairly separate—even if they occur in the same universe and have a few crossover characters. But I’ll spare all my raving for The Winged Histories in the next review. I’ve got to cover A Stranger in […]