The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (Del Rey, 2020)
★★★★☆
Millennia-spanning saga of a spaceship captain, the mysterious boy she grows to consider a son, and their crew of found family.
We open with Kaeda, a man on one of the galactic megacorp’s Resource Worlds. Kaeda lives a simple life farming dhuba in the fields, but every fifteen years, the offworlder ships come to collect the harvest. It’s during these visits that he meets Captain Nia Imani. For Nia, folding her ship through “Pocket Space,” time passes at a much slower rate—months to Kaeda’s decades. They share a brief but asymmetric romance. As time passes, and Kaeda ages but Nia remains youthful, we see how traces of Nia shape the rest of Kaeda’s life; we observe the ferociously human world he inhabits; and we learn about the deep costs of Pocket Space, the tragedies of lost time.
And then the second chapter begins.
I read 200 pages in one sitting, in disbelief and envy that this was Simon Jimenez’s debut novel. The first half is presented as a sequence of fully inhabited short stories, each linked to the previous by such a tenuous thread it seems impossible the connection will hold. But hold it does, as Jimenez strings the orbs into a larger narrative about how we heal from trauma and care for/are cared for by others. The prose is lush, confident, and intensely interested in its subjects. Rarely are we presented with a character any less thoughtfully drawn than Kaeda.
In the latter half, as we learn more about the boy Ahro, focus shifts to the powers who want to claim him. These sections of the book progress more predictably, but culminate in a surprising exploration of resilience—the characters lose much, and gain nothing back easily. I appreciated that narrative choice, even if I personally felt a bit disconnected from the climax’s more metaphysical turns.
All in all, a welcome return to novel-reading, grounded in queer characters and themes, full of heart and emotion. A great quarantine companion that I would compare to Cloud Atlas crossed with The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
(ARC received via The Bookstore.)