'A mysterious child lands in the care of a solitary woman, changing both of their lives forever in this captivating debut of connection across space and time.
"This is when your life begins." Nia Imani is a woman out of place and outside of time. Decades of travel through the stars are condensed into mere months for her, though the years continue to march steadily onward for everyone she has ever known. Her friends and lovers have aged past her; all she has left is work. Alone and adrift, she lives only for the next paycheck, until the day she meets a mysterious boy, fallen from the sky.
'A boy, broken by his past. The scarred child does not speak, his only form of communication the beautiful and haunting music he plays on an old wooden flute. Captured by his songs and their strange, immediate connection, Nia decides to take the boy in. And over years of starlit travel, these two outsiders discover in each other the things they lack. For him, a home, a place of love and safety. For her, an anchor to the world outside of herself.
'For both of them, a family. But Nia is not the only one who wants the boy. The past hungers for him, and when it catches up, it threatens to tear this makeshift family apart.'
Okay, so one of the first things I thought once I'd finished reading The Vanished Birds was that I can't believe that this is a debut novel. The huge, sweeping scale of this story, the wonderfully strange and almost mystical ideas presented, and characters that span centuries all makes this book feel like something an author of decades would produce. The level of literary skill presented here is stunning for a first novel, and I'm certainly going to be watching Simon Jemenez's future work with great interest.
The story, if it can be summarised, follows the captain of a trading ship, Nia Imani. When the book begins Nia and her crew have been transporting produce from a distant world to one of the main human space stations. It's a job that isn't as easy as it sounds, mainly because in order to travel the vast distances between worlds ships have to travel through some kind of pocket space; whilst this allows the ships to travel huge distances in only a few months, time moves differently outside of the pocket, and the crew can lose years of their life.
The first main section of the book introduces this concept in a really clever way, by showing the effect it has on the people left behind. Kaeda is farmer on the world that Nia travels to and from, and when the story begins he's just a child, watching in awe as visitors from the stars visit his home. The ships come back every 15 years, and he watches as he and his world age and change, whilst these visitors hardly change. The effect of having a relationship with someone who stays relatively young whilst you grow old is somewhat shocking when presented this way. Most books would choose to focus on Nia in this moment, to show how hard it is on her to watch a friend grow from childhood to old age whilst they only experience a handful of years; but Jimenez makes the bolder choice of flipping this, and it works so well.
It's on this world that a young boy eventually arrives, crashing from the sky in a ball of fire. The strange child scares the farmers of Kaeda's community, who find the quite boy something to be wary of. Kaeda, however, takes him in and keeps him safe until Nia can arrive. He convinces the captain to take on the boy, and this is where the story shifts to follow Nia instead, revealing that Kaeda and his world were simply an introduction to this universe and the concepts, rather than the focus.
From here the story opens up in scale, showing the readers more and more of this universe, and the way that humanity has evolved since leaving Earth a thousand years before. But these ideas aren't just presented to readers as concepts, we get to see it first hand too, as we're introduced to another central character to the narrative, Fumiko Nakajima. Fumiko is a scientific genius who lived on Earth more than a thousand years before, and we get to follow her through her younger life, see her grow into a hugely respected scientist, we watch her fall in love. But we also see how she lost most of what she held dear whilst trying to secure a future for humanity.
Fumiko is one of the more interesting characters over the course of the book, as due to her using advance technology and cryogenic suspension she has managed to live for over a thousand years. Living for so long, existing outside of normal time, effects Fumiko in ways that you wouldn't expect, and over the course of the narrative we see just how fragile the human mind is, and how living so long can be a curse as much as a blessing.
Eventually Nia and the boy cross paths with Fumiko, and a much bigger story begins, one that I don't want to reveal too much about; but I will say that it becomes a story that spans decades or more, will see characters cross the galaxy, discover amazing, impossible abilities, and even commune with the spiritual. The story is so vast and sweeping, and handles so many heady subjects that I feel I have to call the book a Space Opera. There's just so much here that feels bigger than a lot of other books. Even once it's done, once you've read through hundreds of pages spanning thousands of years and most of the galaxy it still feels like you've barely scratched the surface of this amazing new universe.
There were so many ideas and concepts presented here, some explored deeply, others only briefly touched upon. The Vanished Birds is an entire universe, not just a single story. And it's a universe that I wanted to learn more and more about, that left me with so many questions. However, this never left me feeling unsatisfied, or disappointing. Yes, the book could have been twice as long and included more detail and answered more questions, but that doesn't mean that it would necessarily have been better. Jimenez gives you enough information that it feels real, and like the real world, you're never going to know everything.
The Vanished Birds was stunning to read throughout, it presented huge concepts incredibly well, and has a cast of characters that were wonderfully refreshing to read. There were queer women, women of colour, people of various genders and sexualities; it wasn't a future only inhabited by straight white men, and it was wonderful to read a future where everyone is seen as equal, no matter who they are or who they love. I can't wait to see what Jimenez does next.
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