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kareila_booksI reread All the Birds in the Sky a few months ago to try and get a better handle on what it was I loved about it. It was the characters, first and foremost, and their sacred commitment to empathy, but also the quiet flashes of delight at a turn of phrase or a glimpse of truth or whimsy. This second novel has more of the former and less of the latter; I don't love it quite as much, but I still think it's brilliant. It's also brutal - many named characters die in the blink of an eye, sometimes even if you've barely just met them. This world is a hostile one, full of monsters both human and not.
I've joked with friends that when I was growing up, at odds with the tyranny of conformity and unable to find acceptance outside of academics, I felt more like an alien than a person. The main character here, Sophie, takes this sentiment to an extreme when in the first few pages of the story, she is expelled from the walled city of her birth for a trivial offense and left to die. She encounters a creature that she has been taught to believe is a terrifying monster, but she is so desperate that she decides to trust it, and the understanding that she gains from that choice gradually changes everything.
I've joked with friends that when I was growing up, at odds with the tyranny of conformity and unable to find acceptance outside of academics, I felt more like an alien than a person. The main character here, Sophie, takes this sentiment to an extreme when in the first few pages of the story, she is expelled from the walled city of her birth for a trivial offense and left to die. She encounters a creature that she has been taught to believe is a terrifying monster, but she is so desperate that she decides to trust it, and the understanding that she gains from that choice gradually changes everything.
