As the captain of a transport ship, Nia has spent years travelling space and living from moment to moment. Until one day, a mysterious boy falls from the sky. A boy who communicates with music.

The world building within this story is off the scale. We have rich, deeply explored space scapes of purple skies and cities that never sleep. Each location the crew visits is vivid in imagery and relationships blossom and fade in the blink of an eye. I especially loved the concept of time that the author explored here. For the space crew, and Nia, jumping through space results in a time lapse of months for them - but years for those they leave behind. While some people carry this weight and come out stronger, others struggle with the constant isolation that happens as a result. You can never settle, never start anything new. It also touches on the topic of large scale corporations, greed and the destruction of environments for profit. The writing manages to weave these subjects into the plot without it feeling like a lecture or TED talk, preferring to let the reader draw their own conclusions.

The writing itself is also rather lovely. At times lyrical, musical almost, and highly descriptive. It's easy to get into the world, and feel immersed. However, I do think that the plot itself is extremely slow. It's a very character driven piece, skipping from character to character over a slow building plot that reaches a crescendo at the end. Some people who can't commit to the long haul that this is may be disappointed and find themselves bored at the beginning. However, I would recommend sticking with this. The pay off and conclusion us well worth the wait.

Beautiful vivid writing, lush landscapes and interesting character dynamics. A brilliant science fiction, that breathes new life to the genre.

Astonishing ideas and vision. I really liked the worldbuilding and its complexity and nuance. However, the characters seemed a little flat to me, or perhaps alienated would be a better term. The reasons for how they acted towards each other, and for the affection or bonds they had was only there by authorial fiat, without the story bearing out why they felt that way. I couldn't get invested as a result, and basically speeded through the final 50 or so pages. Nonetheless, I still think about some of this book's images and metaphors - its vision is that powerful.

This is one the best book i read in 2020 as it is hauntingly beautiful and I kept thinking about it even after I turned the last page.
I loved the excellent plot, the great world building, the storytelling and the well thought characters.
I could go on raving about how beautiful this book is but I prefer to keep it short.
It was a fascinating and gripping read that I strongly recommend.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

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.

This was a challenging review to write because this is a book that is difficult to put into words. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting when I went into The Vanished Birds, but I feel that the blurb doesn’t really come close to encapsulating this unique book.

The Vanished Birds immediately gains an extra star just for how beautiful the prose is, regardless of the rest of the book, it is the kind of writing that sweeps you away before you realise it. The descriptions were out of this world (pun intended), and the emotional depth of the narrative, meant that this was a story that for any of its faults wrapped itself around your heart, and I would read it again and again just to lose myself in the writing.

That said, I did find it a difficult book to get into. The first chapter was strange, because it felt as though it could have been almost a standalone short story, and ended up feeling like an overly long prologue in places (and I am usually a fan of prologues), and this then moved into a slow-moving first third or so of the book. This is not a book for someone who wants to be swept away by fast-paced action (at least at the beginning). However, that in itself is not a complaint, because one of the strengths of this book, is the way that it meanders, bringing in characters and narrative threads in one of the most far-reaching space operas I’ve read so far. The Vanished Birds is very much driven by character rather than plot, and it does an excellent job of exploring the relationships between them, and how their choices affect them, the people around them and the world they live in.

Another strength of this book is the setting. Although there were a few places here and there that felt a little more contrived than others, but in a space opera of this size, those are lost amongst the worlds and locations that did stand out. It’s hard not to fall in love with farming worlds with purple skies, space-age, high tech cities and planets that have been abandoned and overrun with dogs. Although a large part of the book is spent on the ship, these worlds were fascinating and a joy to read about, and it left me always wanting to see where the crew would go next.

Where the book lost me a little was towards the later part when the plot took a somewhat surprising and dramatic shift. In some ways, I can understand the timing and pacing, because the book and prose had established itself, and this shift brought some much-needed conflict into the narrative and a feeling of tension and worry for the characters that gave the book extra flavour. However it was such a departure from the previous meandering tone that I had become comfortable with, that I was jolted out by the sharp rise of tension permeating nearly every scene, and it took a little while for me to get back into the flow, although overall I felt that it did add to the narrative. I also thought that the ending fell a little short of what I wanted, not exactly unsatisfying, but as though it could have done with taking a little longer or perhaps having an epilogue just to wrap up the final threads.

Overall though, I did love this book, from the beautiful, lyrical prose which in my opinion is this book’s largest selling point and that I couldn’t get enough, to the sweeping scale of this space opera. I would recommend this book, and I will certainly be on the lookout for more works by Simon Jimenez in the future

This debut novel has got ravishing reviews not only in the blogosphere and from my GR friends, but also from professional reviewers at Kirkus or Locus. Some of them hype it as a clear candidate for winning next season's awards. With today's UK publication by Titan Books, I got a chance to check out an ARC. 

Authors often build up a fan base by publications of short stories before throwing a novel into the competitive pit. Not so with this one, I've never heard of the author before and now I'm positively surprised if not to say blown away by the novel.

What is it about? I wondered that myself for quite a while diving into the book, and it wasn't a page turner for the first half. Yes, it's got pacing issues which cost it half a star and is calling for some patience. 

It is about music and a song as a central theme, the song of homecoming:

"Take my day, they sang, but give me the night.
Feed the hearth and ready the brew,
for I am coming home to you."

It's a simple song sung by workers on agricultural planet Umbai-V where Kaedra lives and every seven years a space ship comes collecting the harvest. Kaedra falls in love with the ship's captain Nia, and his live unfolds in the first part of the novel. It is a tragical romance, because traveling through space is relativistic and Kaedra gets older every time while Nia stays the same age. This remembered me of a similar story by Ken Liu Memories of My Mother and brought the same emotional impact. Their entangled lives was interrupted by a foreign boy landing naked on the planet, and no one knew where he was coming from. As a last gesture, Kaedra put the mute boy into the captain's custody, and that's where the novel left Kaedra. 

My head was swimming when I realized that I wouldn't get back to the character I've been invested in. And that's one of the novel's trademark structure, because it is meandering around some central topics like music, that planet, and three characters: engineer Nakajima who is thousand years old and a VIP in the human universe; said captain Nia and her crew of four; and finally the boy Ahro, who needs to find his voice and bring forth the greatest invention humanity has seen so far: the Jaunt which is instant travel through the galaxy.

So, don't grab the side characters too hard, as entertaining and interesting as they may be, because you never know if you'll loose them. I'm glad that the author told me that lesson early on. It never distanced me from the protagonists, as this is mostly a character-driven narration. Some protagonists like Nakajima are shady at best, but nonetheless highly interesting and engaging. 

Most outstanding is the beautiful prose which cost me some reading time because I wasn't willing to fast read through it and digested it slowly. I'll give you one central scene which is set halfway through the novel when Ahro finally found his special talent:

"In the plaza of the Painted City, below the triad moons, his eyes rolled back and his hand clutched his chest and he let it take him. He gave his body up to the dancers and the moons, the black ocean and the roar. Time inhaled its breath and stopped
the movements of this world. The dancers were pinned to the air and the drinkers held in their kingly repose of goblets tipped into open mouths, while above them all the glittering streamers were glued to the sky, his last thought a guttural recognition of how beautiful it was, this frozen sea of love and action, before the power within him, that old stranger, returned, and upon a blast of light he fell away from this world; his body gone, between the celebratory beat of their drums."

While this was an expected outcome, its development took a good while. When you think "and now that the path is clear and straightforward, it will be a casual stroll through the rest of the book", well, then you're up for several surprises. The author understands to deconstruct expectations in some harsh ways, and readers will have to stomach some swings. 

The book stays interesting in every part of the plot and picks up speed in the second half, even goes frantic in the last one hundred pages. I didn't like the uneven tension arc, but enjoyed the story nonetheless. 

I highly recommend the book for readers of Space Operas who like some narrative twists and endure a slow start.