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sophia_sol) wrote2021-07-07 06:33 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2021-07-07 06:33 pm
The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez
The marketing for a book does a lot of work in terms of setting up expectations for what kind of a book you're reading, and honestly setting correct expectations is super important. It lets the right kind of readers find the book, and it lets the readers be in the right mindset to appreciate the kind of thing the book in question is doing.
All of which is to say: I went into this book expecting Found Family In Space based on the cover copy, and as a result I spent the first third of the book confused, then I got really into it, and then the ending was really upsetting.
This book is excellent at doing the things it's doing! But I was reading with the wrong genre/trope protocols in my head, and it mucked with my expectations, which made the book more challenging than it ought to have been. And made me madder at the book than I ought to have been.
One of the things the book is doing is telling the story from a whole bunch of perspectives and times and places. A lot of people get viewpoint narration, including some who are irrelevant to the story outside their section. This all works very well at building a sort of a tapestry of theme, rather than following the thread of a particular character's story, but I found it disorienting because there was no indication (either in the marketing or in the narrative itself) that that's what it was doing, and so I expected the threads to overlap more consistently/obviously than they did. It took me a while to settle into what the book was actually doing.
This same thing can work very well if you set that expectation for the reader! Victor Hugo does it a whole bunch in Les Miserables, for example. But the narrative will tell you straight out, "oh pardon me we're just going to go on a digression here, I simply MUST first tell you about this random bishop for 60 pages" or whatever, so you know what to expect from it!
The other thing the book is doing is telling a tragedy. Or rather, a bunch of tragedies, intertwined. The cover copy is basically shouting "FOUND FAMILY ALERT!!!" at the reader, and one of the things about the found family trope is that it's supposed to be about finding a place you can be happy and yourself, when you didn't think you'd ever get one; it's supposed to have a happy ending, or at least an ending with hope. That is not what this book is doing with the trope. And as a result, the decidedly unhappy ending felt like much more of a betrayal than it would have if I'd known going in that that's the kind of book it was going to be.
I do think that this is is an excellent book, and the author very skilled; I'm impressed this is his debut novel! It doesn't read like a debut at all, but like it's written by someone who's very confident and capable at doing what he's setting out to do.
But when I closed the cover on it when I reached the end, I just felt so upset. I'd invested a lot of emotional energy into caring about these characters and their efforts to build a family, and it felt like that was all for nothing.
A good book, and a book that I think I would even say I mostly liked, but a book I have complicated feelings about in the end.
All of which is to say: I went into this book expecting Found Family In Space based on the cover copy, and as a result I spent the first third of the book confused, then I got really into it, and then the ending was really upsetting.
This book is excellent at doing the things it's doing! But I was reading with the wrong genre/trope protocols in my head, and it mucked with my expectations, which made the book more challenging than it ought to have been. And made me madder at the book than I ought to have been.
One of the things the book is doing is telling the story from a whole bunch of perspectives and times and places. A lot of people get viewpoint narration, including some who are irrelevant to the story outside their section. This all works very well at building a sort of a tapestry of theme, rather than following the thread of a particular character's story, but I found it disorienting because there was no indication (either in the marketing or in the narrative itself) that that's what it was doing, and so I expected the threads to overlap more consistently/obviously than they did. It took me a while to settle into what the book was actually doing.
This same thing can work very well if you set that expectation for the reader! Victor Hugo does it a whole bunch in Les Miserables, for example. But the narrative will tell you straight out, "oh pardon me we're just going to go on a digression here, I simply MUST first tell you about this random bishop for 60 pages" or whatever, so you know what to expect from it!
The other thing the book is doing is telling a tragedy. Or rather, a bunch of tragedies, intertwined. The cover copy is basically shouting "FOUND FAMILY ALERT!!!" at the reader, and one of the things about the found family trope is that it's supposed to be about finding a place you can be happy and yourself, when you didn't think you'd ever get one; it's supposed to have a happy ending, or at least an ending with hope. That is not what this book is doing with the trope. And as a result, the decidedly unhappy ending felt like much more of a betrayal than it would have if I'd known going in that that's the kind of book it was going to be.
I do think that this is is an excellent book, and the author very skilled; I'm impressed this is his debut novel! It doesn't read like a debut at all, but like it's written by someone who's very confident and capable at doing what he's setting out to do.
But when I closed the cover on it when I reached the end, I just felt so upset. I'd invested a lot of emotional energy into caring about these characters and their efforts to build a family, and it felt like that was all for nothing.
A good book, and a book that I think I would even say I mostly liked, but a book I have complicated feelings about in the end.