The Winged Histories

Starred review from May 23, 2016
Samatar's lush sequel to A Stranger in Olondria is a story of revolution, religion, and electrifying love in four distinct voices. Tavis is close kin to the current Telkan, the ruler of the fantasy realm of Olondria, but she leaves behind the expectations laid on noblewomen to become a soldierâand then, with her cousin Andasya, to lead a new rebellion. Other viewpoint characters are Tialon, daughter of Ivrom, the Priest of the Stone, whose cult is overthrown in the revolution; Seren, a young woman of the nomadic feredhai, who becomes the beloved of Tav; and Siski, Tav's sister and one-time love of Andasya, who is the sole bearer of Andasya's terrible secret. Samatar gives each woman her own style of storytelling and view of events, so that the reader sees this episode in Olondria's history as though looking upon the scene through four different windows. Each character weaves her experiences and observations into the land's folklore and mythology. Samatar refocuses these viewpoints to present something perpetually and pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. Samatar's writing strongly recalls Guy Gavriel Kay's fantasy, which reads like historical fiction, but there are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder.

January 1, 2016
A ruling House faces an internal rebellion that affects the lives of four women. Olondria is in peril. The empire is fractured along religious lines as a new cult competes with ancient rituals. Politically, it has been rendered unstable by wars. As the novel opens, Tav, a teenage girl from the House of Telkan, "the most exalted bloodline" in Olondria, has run away to become a swordmaiden in the army. As she fights alongside the men, she realizes the war is a distraction while the ruling branch of her family subjugates her native kingdom, Kestenya, and surrounding territories. Reaching out to her cousin Dasya, the son of the ruling Telkan, she incites him to fight for a free Kestenya. After learning of Olondria's violent history through Tav, the novel switches point of view three more times, each time offering a different female perspective on the rebellion and its aftermath. Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria, 2013) has created a world in Olondria that is astonishingly rendered: details that even the most realistic of fiction writers might overlook are minutely described here, from one character's music box to the texture of the food. And while the amount of detail in this new world with its complex history requires a deep patience on the part of the reader (and use of the glossary in the back), that patience is rewarded. Samatar is a writer of uncommon beauty, and she takes a genre that has historically tended to focus on the heroic exploits of men and shows how those exploits involve and affect women. This novel teaches us the importance of giving voice to experience and bearing witness; as one character says, writing is less about words than "how we are written into one another. How this is history." A lyrical immersion into a finely wrought world.

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March 15, 2016

Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria won the World Fantasy Award after its publication in 2013. Now the author returns with a story of four women, each pulled into the rebellion in Olondria, each seeking survival and to tell her own tale.--MM

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