The Vanished Birds

Do not recommend the audiobook, the narrator did not do a good job with differentiating their voice enough for the different characters to make it clear who was talking. All the males sounded alike and most of the females all sounded the same as well. So if you do go into this one, I would recommend reading the book itself.

The first chapter was amazing, and I was enraptured by it. It does have impact on the overall story, but to have such a well-written character and world be completely done with by the first chapter was kind of frustrating. Looking into it, it makes sense, because the first chapter was written as a short story initially.

The characters were not super likable for me. Attachments are formed really quickly without substance and there's so many people introduced and incorporated throughout that it was hard to really connect with any of them because you weren't sure if it would be worth remembering them since they may disappear in the next chapter.

The actual writing was very well done. The way that Jimenez describes his worlds was fantastic and did a great job of helping you picture what it would look like. The biggest downfall was that there's just way too much talking and not enough actually going on through the last half of the book. It was also annoying to be teased with these great descriptions of places to have it never be spoken of and not have the characters actually go there to interact with the environment. It felt like the book was torn in a few too many directions and lacked some cohesiveness because of it.

Overall, I am not upset that I read it and do not feel like it was a massive waste of time. This was a debut novel which makes me inclined to believe that Jimenez has a lot of promise and I am interested to see if/how he is able to further develop and hone his skills.

"There is no assuaging the fear that things end and people leave."

Wow. I'm not sure how to properly review this, and hope that a simple 'wow' will convey the feeling I have upon finishing this book.

The story... hm. The story revolves around a boy and his found-family. In this universe where travelling long distances in space is done through jumps and lost time (weeks/months/years) for the crew, Nia Imani crosses paths with a boy whose appearance on a backwater planet was sudden and mysterious. He can't speak, has no memory of how he got there, crash landed and naked in a field. The inhabitants of the planet are unsettled, and send the boy off with Nia to find where he belongs. Where he ends up belonging is...complicated. Within him, his bone, his blood, are secrets that put him and everyone around him at risk, and Nia is tasked with keeping him safe as he comes of age. Things get...complicated.

Interspersed with this story are other points of view from other people important to the overall story. Chief among them is the story of Fumiko Nakajima, starting a thousand years before the time of Nia and the mysterious boy, as she develops space travel, folding space, entire space stations, and all sorts of advances that completely alter the landscape of humans in space. High on her accolades, she thinks she can do no wrong as her story intersects with the story of Nia and the boy.

Let's be frank here -- there's no big space battles. No dramatic escapes. No last-second rescue attempts. Nothing here that really could be considered Star Wars material. This is very much a character-driven family story, in hard sci-fi space. But what a story. It is beautiful. It is horrible. It is heartwarming. It is heartwrenching.

Wow.