Songs for the Shadows

"Songs for the Shadows" is a stunning, poetic, beautifully imagined novella set in the collaborative Afrofuturist Sauútiverse world. I hadn't heard of the Sauútiverse before this novella came across my radar, but I will be eagerly anticipating other works in this universe moving forward!

Summary: In a world where sounds and song exist as powerful artifacts, Shad-Dari is the captain of a ship of excavators who find and capture rare, dangerous sounds. She is haunted by tangible echoes of her lost loved ones, and steals and listens to illicit sound fragments in order to forcefully suppress those echoes. We follow Shad-Dari's tragic past, rebellious present, and strange future as she navigates what these echoes mean to her, and if she'll ever find a way to escape them.

The prose is vivid, poetic, and engaging; there's a lot of worldbuilding to set up in order to understand Shad-Dari's context, and Ntumy does so masterfully. The supporting characters, especially Bed-Shek and the mysterious Mahu Mahadii, leap off the page, and the slow unfolding of Shad-Dari's story rewards your investment with the expansive imaginative palette of a true storyteller right in her element.

I read the novella in one sitting and wished there was more! Very much looking forward to checking out the other Sauútiverse works. If you're a fan of great writing and Afrofuturism, I can't recommend Songs for the Shadows enough.

I loved the blend of African culture and how sound was used as a power in this novella. The story was wonderfully done and enjoyed that the concept worked overall. The characters felt like well rounded characters and how they worked in this universe. Cheryl S. Ntumy has a way with words and had me engaged from start to finish.

Songs for the Shadows by Cheryl S. Ntumy is the first novella in the Sauutiverse, and takes the worldbuilding done previously to weave a story of a woman fleeing a grief she never knew what to do with. I loved how the setting was brought to life in this story, and the themes really resonated with me as I navigate a grief of my own.


Shad-Dari is a celebrated excavator, using her abilities to capture ancient sounds from various sites across the Sauutiverse. But behind that lays a secret – with every sound she finds, she shaves off a sliver for herself to keep. In the Sauutiverse, sound powers both the magic and science of the worlds, and Shad-Dari has an echo inside her that she can only silence in increasingly self destructive ways. At first she turned to drugs and revelry, but now only in taking in increasingly dangerous slivers of sound can she silence the echoes for any length of time. You see, Shad-Dari, or Shad-Dar-Dar as she was born, lost most of her family in a sudden and tragic accident. The echoes in her soul are echoes of them and she’ll do anything to escape them, short of purposefully taking her own life.

I very recently lost a beloved and young pet in a similarly violent accident, and in Shad-Dari I see the part of myself that wants to deny the trauma, run from the feelings of pain, confusion and grief that comes with that sudden loss. But grief cannot be ignored, and her actions lead her down an increasingly fraught path, eventually forcing her into a reckoning with herself as she causes the foundations of her life to shift.

I love the texture of the Sauutiverse, and as one of the founding writers, Ntumy has a great skill at bringing it to life. I do wonder at how accessible this novella is as a first entry into the Sauutiverse for a reader – I think a few too many unrequired setting elements are mentioned, certainly if no glossary is provided as in the e-arc I read. However most of the important parts can be inferred, or understood enough through the context of Shad-Dari’s experience. I have no qualms about recommending Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology as an ideal first entry into the setting if readers are interested in starting from a more well rounded understanding.

I devoured this novella by Cheryl S. Ntumy and heartily recommend it to Sauutiverse fans and beyond as a nuanced focus on one character’s experience of grief avoidance in a vibrant setting

Rating: 9/10

Having read work by Cheryl Ntumy before, I was already excited for this. Glad to see the Sauutiverse grow and this novella blew me away with the world-building and magic system. I also appreciated the metaphor (at least from my own thought processes) about the world we live in today and how African societies have lost connection to our histories which were mainly passed on through oral narration and therefore the power of sound. An amazing and emotional journey this was! Long live #Africanfuturism

A fantastic, mind-bending journey set in the Sauutiverse shared universe. The end of the book was especially satifying, as all of the pieces came together in an unexpected--yet perfectly orchestrated way.