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ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
“In the oldest days jut lived in the sea. All the separate janut and the whole jut, it was all there, all one. The people faced the sea when they prayed, and they knew that something powerful lived in it, and they never teased it or insulted it. Then one day a little girl came… and she said, I’m going to go and talk to jut. … I’m that girl, I think. I am like the girl who called jut. Always outside, always different from people. It’s not only that I’m different, it’s that I don’t want to be different and yet I am proud, almost proud of the difference itself. I won’t try to change.”
TITLE—A Stranger in Olondria
AUTHOR—Sofia Samatar
PUBLISHED—2013
PUBLISHER—Small Beer Press
GENRE—literary fantasy
SETTING—Olondria, Nissia & the Tea Islands
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—beautiful & intricate worldbuilding, coming of age story, linguistics & languages, family relationships & heritage, books: reading & writing them, travel, ghosts/angels, possession & hauntings, death, madness, colonialism & classism, caste systems, religious factionism, remembering, oral storytelling vs written words
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—Sorry but genre fiction has no business being this beautifully written!
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
WORLDBUILDING—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
FAVORITE PART—The scene with Jissavet on the beach w Ainut and the Prav sailors was **phenomenal.** One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/⭐️
“Darkness. The darkness of the old gods, gods who though foreign are like my own: gods of discord, pathos, and revelation. The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness. A blackness where something lives. I breathe in precious, pampered air, antique dust, the starveling ghosts of incense.”
My thoughts:
The writing style for this book was very literary so much so that it felt like I was reading a whole subgenre of fantasy distinguished solely by its writing style. I would definitely be interested in discovering more “literary fantasy” because I don’t think I have read any before this one. 👀 I particularly loved Samatar’s habit of ending paragraphs with a particularly poignant sentence—it reminded me a little of oral storytelling techniques that use the final line or verse to give a particularly beautiful emphasis to that passage.
The spiritual, natural, and beautiful worldbuilding and writing style almost reminded me of Tolkien in a way, but much more modern. The only worldbuilding exposition Samatar did was done in the context of simultaneously illuminating some deeper spiritual or philosophical theme related to the characters or peoples in the book. And while yes that’s technically just good writing, there was something about her particular style of doing it that made it especially impactful I thought. (I can’t stop thinking about the scene on the beach! Just so achingly beautiful.)
For me, most of the fantasy I’ve read seems to be about 1) the plot 2) the characters and 3) the worldbuilding, and while the writing still needs to be excellent, in OLONDRIA, the writing was *so* beautiful that it actually sometimes seemed to distract me from the plot and even the worldbuilding so much that I felt like I couldn’t pay attention to it or even struggled to follow it at times. The last third of the book though was my favorite part and I didn’t struggle as much as I did following Jissavet’s story as I did with Jevick’s.
I think maybe when a book has *both* literary writing and a highly compelling plot, I still need to figure out how to hold all of that in my brain at the same time. It might be too advanced for me. 😂 Although I think this is why at times this book reminded me of Hilary Mantel because I think I had the same problem with her WOLF HALL books (which are also very literary examples of genre fiction!) But whatever it is, I’ll be rereading this one for sure. I think it should be a summer read. Something about reading this seaside feels right to me as well. Gah! It’s probably that beach scene! 😆
I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy particularly intricate worldbuilding and more literary fantasy. This book is best read when you’re in a position to take a long time with your reading and really focus on the poetic language.
Final note: I’m really excited to read THE WINGED HISTORIES from her next!
“Fragile, she was fragile and impermanent as salt. Like salt she would dissolve, lose her substance. And like salt she would flavor everything with a taste that was sharp and amniotic, disquieting and unmistakable. The gods saw. They saw what I had seen aboard the Ardonyi, this girl with her piquant, pleasing oddity, her lips from which such strange utterances fell… They saw the dark and vibrant eyes in which all of her life was concentrated; they knew her erratic moods, her mysterious will, her loneliness which she could not explain to anyone, and her violent rage which had given me so much pain… Had they not simply recognized, in her, one of themselves?”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
CW // child abuse (esp. of a disabled child), forced institutionalization, self harm (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- THE WINGED HISTORIES, by Sofia Samatar (book 2)
- THE BIRD KING, by G. Willow Wilson
- Robin Hobb (world building)
- WASHINGTON BLACK, by Esi Edugyan (themes & characterization)
- EARTHSEA, by Ursula K. Le Guin—TBR
- WOLF HALL, by Hilary Mantel (writing style)
- BABEL, by RF Kuang (themes)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, War, and Blood
Moderate: Forced institutionalization and Self harm
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