This is a very character-focused novel, and becoming invested in them isn’t difficult. Simon Jimenez’s writing is deep and soulful in its handling of our characters’ secret hearts and minds. The overall tone of the story can be described as quiet and emotional, but what it lacks in excitement and action it makes up for with meaningful relationships and the weight of personal decisions. Even with all the losses, there is still light. This book was beautiful. I'm just sad it took me so long to read it.

This is a long, slow story. I kind of think this one book could be a series on its own. It covers a lot of time, but particularly the life of a boy on a planet, who he meets, and how their world works. It's well written, but it's not at all fast-paced. It's slow and methodical. It covers thousands of years, which is one reason it's so long and covers so many events and times. It's still Sci-Fi and yes, it has birds. It also has mystery and a long space opera. Chapter one is history, and then we get to the main story/stories. A very well-crafted tale, I just don't know exactly how I feel about it yet.

Thanks to Net Galley for my digital copy. This is my review. There is not a requirement that it be positive.

A gorgeous debut about the power of found family and the curse of relativity. Pure poetry. The characters are the focus here, and they feel fully realized. When you layer the themes of colonialism, corporate greed, betrayal, and isolation overtop, you get an incredibly human—if not always hopeful—pastiche.

The story starts off on a small working planet. They get visited by people from wealthier planets from time to time to get their crops (or whatever goods it is they harvest or specialise in) bought. One night, something crashed on their planet–a boy. This boy changed the entire trajectory of the story and the book’s perspective starts to follow him. Divulging many lives and all that is involved within the story.

Science fiction is a bit of a tricky read for me due to the fact that they tend to info-dump you or, in this case, not at all. This was quite an easy read in that it didn’t give much information about the scientific aspect of the book–or was I lost and just didn’t get that it did? Anyway, the book primarily focused on the people of the story. Their relationships, the ideas behind their persons, and all there is to know to dive deep on this character’s psyche. And as much as this was the case, I did not, at all, connect with them.

There was so much more details that I wanted to understand. Simple yet important, as they are part of the story’s concept. It could be that I am not well acquainted with sci-fi that it slipped my head, these ‘could be given knowledge.’ But I still believe that it would’ve been a better idea to at least give information about these small points.

As a whole, I find the book fascinating. With its discussion on friendship, family, and loss. There was a true beauty to it despite the disconnect that I felt for it. I was entranced by the theme Jimenez used for the story–the multiple planets and time warps. The atmosphere was great and effective in isolating the integrity and personification of each characters. Most of all, I loved what the story wanted you to feel. That it reminds us that love is universal and home isn’t always the house we live in but the people we meet along the way of life.

It is quite unfortunate that this book didn’t work well for me as I would like it to, but I’m sure many will appreciate it.

A beautiful SciFi-Fantasy of found families, leaving home and what we leave behind. This is a beautiful poetic novel and I highly recommend it. My heart wept at parts and everything in my soul was wrecked. I can not express enough how beautiful this book is.

A 2021 Hugo voter packet read. Enjoyed it and would recommend it for someone wanting space science fiction, although I read A Spear Cuts through Water earlier this year and it is absolutely my favorite by Simon Jimenez.

This book just did not click with me. I usually like blends of genres, but this left me feeling sort of confused (especially in the beginning). I was a little thrown by the sci-fi themes - I think I was expecting more fantasy and magical realism. It also felt really slow-paced to me. I think Jimenez’s writing style is really interesting, but this just didn’t fall into my wheelhouse.

I really enjoyed this and thought the story was interesting and unique. The world building was top knotch.

Hurray, only one more book to read and I'll finally be done with the 2020 Hugos, glargh!

So this was an interesting novel. Good, but I can see why I never hear of it outside of this nomination, even as plugged in as I generally am to publishing and particularly genre circles. The Vanished Birds is deeply human to the point where, while you understand the motivations of many of the characters and particularly the villains, they're mostly so irrevocably flawed that it's hard to make yourself care very deeply about them. Our heroes shake out better, even if everyone has a decidedly bleaker and more narrow ending than you'd expect. I don't mind a sorrowful ending -- Gideon The Ninth and Jude The Obscure are two of my favorite books of all time, after all -- but there's a particular balance to be struck when trying to get the reader to emotionally invest in the proceedings, such that even an unhappy ending still needs to make you feel something more than primarily impatience with what's just transpired.

Fortunately for our two main characters, patience is their stock in trade. Nia is a space captain running from her own past, a woman perhaps too willing to cut and run when times get emotional or tough. A sexual liaison on the resource planet of Umbai-V leads to her becoming the caretaker of a boy who falls out of their sky one day, as she's entrusted by her lover to bring the strange child back to the galactic authorities she represents. In the span of the months-long trip home however, she and the boy grow attached, a relationship that will serve them well when one of humanity's greatest thinkers comes to Nia with a proposition that will keep the duo together despite bureaucratic interference, at least for a few more years of travel.

Famed research scientist Fumiko Nakajima is millennia old, and still under the contract she signed with the Umbai Corporation in her youth. What she wants with Nia and the boy is top secret. To this end, she's happy to supplement Nia's dwindling crew for the seemingly random, entirely punishing mission she wants them to undertake. The crew members Fumiko provides are all deeply loyal to her, even tho going on this mission is a relative exile from her exalted circles. But just when it seems that they've finally accomplished what they set out to do, a terrible betrayal changes everything. What lengths will Nia and Fumiko each go to in order to right the wrongs of the past, and to be reunited with the ones they love?

Interestingly, the real villain in all this is the mindless devotion to progress and convenience that sacrifices the unwilling few for the oblivious many. The vivisectionists of the Umbai corporation learned well the lessons of Omelas: do not display your depravity but hide it, and the masses will gravitate to a plausible deniability instead of dissent. Yet it's hard to fault people for only being able to do so much against the face of corporate greed. People who aren't uber wealthy are often understandably preoccupied with trying to survive, while billionaires and oligarchs and their minions actively pursue evil in their own manufactured dark.

In that sense, this book is a success, as it reminds readers that corporate greed lies in direct opposition to a world that's better and fairer for everyone. But I feel that TVB sacrifices clarity towards the end in favor of propping up its own elliptical structure, and starts treating characters as archetypes, further dissociating the reader from their struggles. I cared about Nia and the boy but I felt that the book closed in a place that was aiming for mythos and misstepped instead, cutting off the story where it should have continued.

This was, overall, a good read with terrific representation, and zero conflict about diverse sexualities, which is actually really refreshing! If you're looking for sophisticated dissections of power and commerce tho, I'd recommend <a href="https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/05/11/the-traitor-baru-cormorant-the-masquerade-1-by-seth-dickinson/">Seth</a> <a href="https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/02/the-monster-baru-cormorant-the-masquerade-2-by-seth-dickinson/">Dickinson's</a> <a href="https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/22/the-tyrant-baru-cormorant-the-masquerade-3-by-seth-dickinson/">Masquerade</a> novels instead.

Oh, and I liked this quotation from one of my favorite characters, Sartoris, enough to highlight it in my Kindle, so might as well share it here:

<blockquote>We live this life only once. We must live it bravely."</blockquote>

Simon Jimenez can definitely write some really fine turns of phrase. I was 100% unsurprised to come to the last page of the novel and discover that he has an MFA. There's an ambition to the structure of this book that, in the end, doesn't quite make the sum greater than the parts of its whole: entire chunks feel lifted from different novelettes to pad out the main plot, and parts that probably deserved greater focus (the boy's origin, especially) gain far too short shrift. Regardless, I'll keep an eye out for Mr Jimenez's sophomore work and see if he can live up to the potential he shows in these pages.

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez was published January 14 2020 by Del Rey and is available from all good booksellers, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/15382/9780593128985">Bookshop!</a>

I'm currently clearing out all of the books that were published in 2019-20 from my title feedback view!

This was a heart-, gut-, and throat-punch of a book. Beautiful prose and exquisite pain and beauty. Bittersweet dialed to 11, I hope this book finds its readers, because it deserves all the love.

This is a novel that tries to do too much, and in trying, misses the boat on most everything. While I admire Jimenez for attempting an epic space saga about interpersonal connection, I have to cringe at how it played out. As others have noted, the first part feels like a stand-alone story. I didn't deeply connect with any of the players, but at least the young boy (not a child...he's 12 already) was interesting. Then we move into another story that feels like it should stand alone, Nia and her spaceship. Again, I didn't really connect, but at least the boy was interesting.

Then we move to another story that feels like it should stand along, our ugly woman who falls in love with a beautiful woman, but she picks her intellectual future over her romantic. She then spends the rest of the story lamenting this, even when her memory is too shot to remember.

This novel is neither lyrical nor beautifully written. It is a jumble of stories that attempt to connect, loosely do so, but left me feeling like I had no connection with any character, let alone the whole book. There is a character for everyone to try to identify, but they are shallow and shadows and none of them left any impression on me.

Overall, I think Jimenez had a decent story, but he needed to focus on the core instead of trying to tell all the stories that were connected. Had he done that, and given the main players more depth, he might have had a decent book worth 3 or even maybe 3.5 stars. As is, I feel 2 is being overly generous, and he only gets that because the writing is clean and his sense of place was decent.

The first half of this book was pretty okay, very readable and kept me interested enough to keep moving along. But the second half -- whoo boy! When it takes off, it really takes off! It took this book from an enjoyable read to an amazing experience. The first 3 chapters or so feel like interlinked short stories, and as the story progresses they become one larger narrative. The characters in this book really shine. Even the smallest character in this book is given a depth that most authors can only dream of giving their characters. The writing has a very lyrical quality as well.

You know that reading experience where you are almost done with a book, and it's REALLY good, but you have to go to work? Then you spend the whole day thinking about how you need to finish that book IMMEDIATELY afterwards? That was me yesterday as I was finishing this book. I had 5% left before work, then got to 99% on my lunch break, then finished the last 1% in my car before driving home.

This is probably my favorite book of 2021. It grabbed me by my emotions and hauled me through until the end. Amazing.

I enjoyed this book. It is good they didn't try to explain the "science" of how the travel worked. Interesting characters. An achievement for a new author.

The scale of this book was tremendous (spanning galaxies and millennia) but still imbued with an intense, personal intimacy throughout.

The writing flows like poetry, beautiful and evocative, but I am not sure what I am reading - the narrative seems to be both primitive and other-wordly. The life stories of simple people involved with each other and also space traveling aliens. Nicely written, but not really my taste.

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez tells a story that spans lifetimes and galaxies. We follow, primarily, Nia Imani, a ship captain who journeys decades in mere months, and who takes on an unnamed, scarred boy with a gift for music.

This book was gorgeous and unlike anything I've ever read. While it took some time to adjust to the way Jimenez pulls us from one character to another like a hot knife through butter, once I grew accustomed to the style, I was absolutely enraptured. The writing is stunning. Multiple times, lines just absolutely took my breath away, or descriptions made me look at something mundane in an entirely new light.

I also adored the characters and the depth and complexity they brought to the page. I don't know that there was a single character who I thought was absolutely perfect or absolutely awful. Ultimately, they were all just people, and I grew to love them, and love reading about them, despite and because of their flaws.

I think I'll still be processing this book for quite some time, but I absolutely cannot recommend it enough.

The Vanished Birds changes many times over the course of the book. It opens telling one story, then transforms into another, and another. It's only towards the end that you get the fuller picture of how everything is linked together. It's a book about travel; about science and the costs of discovery; about corporate greed; but most of all, it's a book about home. It broke my heart sometimes, and I loved it.

The writing is beautiful and lyrical, melding well with the book's idea of how music links the universes together, the characters and the larger world have a lot of stories that are hinted at, but the writer doesn't feel a need to exhaustively explicate. I'm very happy the Hugo packet gave me access to this book.

Received as part of the Hugo Packet for 2022 - it's a worthy nominee and I was quite grateful to the publishers and author for their generosity.

Beautiful! Character driven and so unique in its storytelling. Unlike any book I've read and automatically a favorite.