Ntumy doesn’t wait for you to catch up: she drops readers right into the action of Shad-Dari’s storyworld. Formerly known as Sha’dar’dar (see the echoes?), Shad-Dari, reeling from loss, leaves her home world of Ekwukwe for Órino-Rin, where she finds work as an excavator of old-world sounds (which are cultural artefacts, in a pocket universe where sound is wonderfully material). Shad-Dari is as oblivious as most of us are to the things driving her, and seems to have a death wish. It takes an unexpected and disorienting fall through time to correct her path, but the story will not go in the direction you expect.

This dense and lovely novella made me think a lot about one of my favourite subjects, the circularity, or non-linearity, of time in many African worldviews. I also found it really clever to centre on sound as material heritage because of the centrality of orality in the transmission of knowledge and stories in many African cultures. Western civilisation has considered Africa and Africans outside of history supposedly because we have not been able to produce enough written records of our existence, not enough to satisfy the standards of their ways of seeing the world. They have not valued our oral traditions as we do. Imagine if we could have and had physically captured the sounds of all we’ve known here, on the continent? If we had libraries of those, that did not reside in frail and death-prone humans? However, *Songs of the Shadows*, while making me think, is not at all concerned with proving anything in this direction: the ones who value these artefacts, the only people that matter in this novella, are the people of these worlds, and never outsiders.

It’s always such a pleasure to read SF outside of Western worldviews and imaginaries; partly, the ideas presented in *Songs* are ones I’m familiar with in the core of me, but also, humanity should never depend for visions of the future on one hegemonic (and historically oppressive) culture. If we do, how are we going to imagine our way into an expansive and inclusive future? There are other ways of seeing, other imaginaries; and this fraction of the Sauútiverse presents one, through the arc of this singular character, Shad-Dari.

Highly recommended. And very many thanks to Atthis Arts and NetGalley for early access.

This was a fascinating and refreshingly different read. This novella is an entry in the collaborative Sauútiverse, a shared world project created by a collective of African authors. After reading this short but beautiful book, I am very interested in reading more in this world.

This fast paced and beautifully written novella dropped me right into the Sauútiverse, with an intriguing story about grief and confronting the past. I liked the main character quite a lot and thought she was wonderfully complex. The world-building was excellent, with lots of fascinating little asides that each felt like they could be the start of their own stories.

I really enjoyed this and would read a follow up in a heartbeat. In the meantime I immediately purchased a copy of Mothersound, an anthology of Sauútiverse short stories published in 2022.

Huge thanks to Cheryl S. Ntumy, Atthis Arts, and NetGalley for generously providing an ARC for review!

I didn’t have any problem reading this novella without having read the earlier Sauútiverse anthology, or a story that Interzone published, although I may have missed some nuances here. Cheryl S. Ntumy did a fine job of supplying context that’s needed when it’s needed. I found the worldbuilding satisfyingly rich and intriguing, as I’d have expected from a shared universe with multiple creators, but also internally consistent, from what I could tell. That makes sense, given that Sauúti pitches must follow a story bible and pass muster with a collective of creators.

What I did find challenging was empathizing with the protagonist, although eventually I found myself at peace with her, as she found her own type of peace. The novella opened with Shad-Dari skipping out on a party she was throwing for her crew so that she could go bully a healer into flooding her body with a magical soundwave in order to silence her own internal echoes. This questionable “healing” was powered via shards that Shad-Dari had secretly abstracted from her own archaeological expedition.

So I was reading for the plot and the worldbuilding, not rooting for the protagonist. To be fair, I’ve never lost my home or a bunch of relatives in a tragedy, or been plagued by a sort of magical tinnitus that sounds like my dead family constantly whispering my name, and it turned out that Shad-Dari was working for an apparently exploitive corporation, not directly for real scholars, so maybe I didn’t have any right to judge her. However, she was still stealing from her heritage with only weak, self-serving justifications, so my sympathy as a reader was extremely limited at first.

What with this being a novella, it didn’t take too long for Shad-Dari to start facing consequences for her actions; at first completely bewildered and lost as to how to proceed, she kept trying various reactions, instead of just giving up, so I had to admire her persistence. Finally, she started facing up to her past and the reality of her situation, and embracing honesty within herself, and even looking beyond her own needs.

That might sound like a fairly typical redemption arc, but I’ve left out a lot of spoilery stuff about Shad-Dari’s interactions with other entities, plus her identity issues, plus temporal complications and more. For a novella, there’s a lot going on here.

I really enjoyed getting immersed into the Sauútiverse, learning a few things about how it works and how many elements of it are tied together, through following Shad-Dari’s literal and emotional journeys. She wasn’t always easy to identify with, but she was intense and interesting, and the revelations and transformations that she underwent felt rewarding in the end. I look forward to reading more stories in this setting, and more stories by Ntumy, here or in worlds all her own.

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.

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

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

The premise and cover for this book drew me in but I honestly couldn't get past the first chapter. If a story doesn't have me wanting more at the end of chapter 1 I find it difficult to continue reading and this story falls into that category.

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" 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.

Shad-Dari has escaped her past, her dreams now in reach. An excavator of the valuable old sounds of Órino-Rin, she steals tiny, unheard fragments of the sacred songs to erase the painful echo of her home planet, Ekwukwe. In one rebellion too far, she sets off a chain of events that severs her from time itself, forcing her, without another way forward, to face her past.

This was not at all what I expected, but I was really blown away by this emotional story. First off, I love sci-fi novellas and I am always excited to give a new author a try. Second, I was so drawn in by the concept of excavating old sounds and the power of oral histories and stories from the past. While this is an important part of the story, the greater plot is about learning to live with grief and one inability to outrun one's past.

I will admit I had a little trouble wrapping my head around the world and names at first, especially the importance of names. This is an amazing world, part of the larger "Sauutiverse" and I wanted to know more about the planets and the star systems and the species. Most of all, I would have loved to have a better understanding of the importance of the old sounds; their uses, the magic system, etc. But the story takes off at a break-neck pace and you just need to hold on for the ride. I did not find Shad-Dari particularly likeable in the first half of the story, but that is definitely the point. Her arc and character growth are what make this story so impactful and I was blown away by the ending.

Thank you NetGalley and Victory Editing NetGalley Co-Op for a free copy of this eARC in return for an honest review.
#Sauútiverse #NetGalley