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Šehhinah #2
The Birds that Fly at Dusk
Creating a manifestation of one’s soul is the ultimate goal of many humans and demons in the world of Šehhinah.
The only problem is, manifesting your soul means other people can see it.
Celyet left her home and everything she knows behind after her manifestation was desecrated.
Ēshva has been hiding their manifestation for years ever since it nearly killed their friend.
And Yairēn doesn’t believe she can manifest at all, convinced that her soul itself is worthless.
When these three broken people’s lives collide at a coffee shop owned by none other than the angel Jibril, it might just be that they can help each other.
If they don’t give themselves frostbite first.
And it might just be that Jibril has advice they need to hear. Ideas unheard of among angels or humans. Ideas about the full extent of what a soul can be.
Ideas even God isn’t aware of.
The only problem is, manifesting your soul means other people can see it.
Celyet left her home and everything she knows behind after her manifestation was desecrated.
Ēshva has been hiding their manifestation for years ever since it nearly killed their friend.
And Yairēn doesn’t believe she can manifest at all, convinced that her soul itself is worthless.
When these three broken people’s lives collide at a coffee shop owned by none other than the angel Jibril, it might just be that they can help each other.
If they don’t give themselves frostbite first.
And it might just be that Jibril has advice they need to hear. Ideas unheard of among angels or humans. Ideas about the full extent of what a soul can be.
Ideas even God isn’t aware of.
- GenresFantasy
ebook
Published February 14, 2018
41 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 13, 2023
I ended The Birds That Fly At Dusk completely absorbed into this series’s deeply compelling, convincing, and carefully crafted world. It gave me a sense of the weight and implications of the towering theological quandary the book builds up and leaves as a cliffhanger almost as intimate as if I was a resident of this fictional world myself. This is a truly difficult task when it comes to building fictional worlds where the central conflict and problem to be solved is something that does not have an easy metaphorical representation or comparison in real life. Yet Skye outlines, with a convincing immediacy and believability that demands to be taken seriously, this looming problem — the terrifying question of what does God and godhood, and particularly the fiat of monotheistic godhood, imply about how the world and its inhabitants will continue into the future and after the world’s end.
The characters fit into the articulation of this in a very relatable way, with the points of view closely inside their heads and looking at their thoughts. My favorites were the main character of Celyet, an unusual and startlingly deep figure who’s greatest terror is of being misinterpreted by her surface by people with no inkling of what she truly is, and the supporting angel Jibril whose personality is so charming and larger-than-life that I ended the book wanting more of their insightful absurdity alongside my hunger to see how the suspenseful theological quandary will resolve.
The characters fit into the articulation of this in a very relatable way, with the points of view closely inside their heads and looking at their thoughts. My favorites were the main character of Celyet, an unusual and startlingly deep figure who’s greatest terror is of being misinterpreted by her surface by people with no inkling of what she truly is, and the supporting angel Jibril whose personality is so charming and larger-than-life that I ended the book wanting more of their insightful absurdity alongside my hunger to see how the suspenseful theological quandary will resolve.
May 22, 2021
I AM SO EXCITED FOR THE NEXT BOOK IN THIS SERIES!! The Birds That Fly At Dusk really levels up the stakes and ante from the more exploratory slice of life style in The Stars That Rise At Dawn, but in a way that was obviously foreshadowed from the very beginning. This is an odd and difficult to categorize series, and I mean that in a good way, there’s no way it would ever blur together with any other fantasy books you’d read.
Not going to lie I was disappointed when I realized that this book had a different cast of characters from the first book, but I’m really glad I got around to reading it anyway, because it really makes clear that the ‘main plot’ of the series isn’t tied down to one group of characters, this new cast has a totally different arc that opens up some totally different ideas. It also really resolves or satisfies a bunch of the things I felt were kind of underdone and not focused on enough in The Stars, so that was satisfying. Although on balance, I think this book has a bit of ‘second in a trilogy syndrome’ with feeling less full and strong than the first, the cliffhanger at the end makes up for it.
I absolutely LOVED the character of Celyet, my new favorite character in this series so far and one of my favorite new ones I’ve met in new fiction in a while. Yairēn was also the type of character who, a little like Elīya from The Stars, started out kind of annoying/frustrating but wound up very very likable through the sympathy of the writing.
I have two main criticisms of this book that made me lower it to 4 stars instead of 5:
The first, which is something that might well wind up working out fine by the next book, is some parts of the characterization of God. I really really liked the intense, wordless, extremeness-of-a-certain-way-of-being in both this book and the previous one, I definitely have no issue with that. The issue is that after the reveal that other gods are possible, that Celyet and Ēshva identify as gods, and that God doesn’t know this yet.......well, in retrospect some of the more jocular and condescensing parenting-a-toddler discussion of God hits different: it’s no longer so much a deliciously Jewish-y joking about an unparalleled and singular power of the universe where people must struggle with God and only with God. Instead it feels a little cheap, as if the only justification for having other gods is because the one they have now has the intellect of an animal and is incapable of having complex thoughts or reflections. (Which is not needed! The argument made in this book spans multiple chapters and is VERY well articulated, the most intelligently discerning and perfect God could not render the argument moot). If God is as toddler-like and incompetent at their job of understanding people’s arguments as Jibril (perhaps simply in jest, or unreliably, but perhaps it is supposed to be taken seriously) suggests, and, if God can’t even understand what a god is.....it’s hard to see why the characters inside this world would think the reveal that other gods are possible is a big deal, and hard to understand why it is still an unheard-of concept for this world all after so many millennia.
Don’t get me wrong, here as in the first book there are still scenes and quotes that do give a powerful impression of God as so extreme and unique-seeming that you can see why no one inside this world thinks there can be another one—Celyet and Lilith’s whole conversation, Jibril and Ēshva’s exchange about the beginning of the universe on the mountain, the flashback to the manic ecstasy of many holies. But then these get repeatedly backtracked and undercut, as if the author is afraid that making God too cool will make other gods seem less cool, whereas I think it’s the other way around. If Jibril was deliberately keeping the idea of other gods a secret from God, for example out of concern either God or humanity couldn’t survive it, it would have been so much better. Of coiurse it may turn out my impressions were totally wrong by the next book. But if so, ironic that so much of the book surrounded Celyet’s agony over the idea of other people’s misinterpretation and twisting of her.
My second and more concrete criticism of this book is the character of Ēshva. It’s not that I didn’t like them or their backstory, but the way they were written felt a little too “typical” a character for this series. I feel like characters who are simply afraid of their own powers are a bit overrepresented in scifi/fantasy and superhero stories, and the best parts of Ēshva’s pov chapters were the ones that instead focused on the truly agonizing awareness that their manifestation was proof their soul was “bad” and that this perceived badness was in fact inherent, just as Celyet, Elīya, and Yenatru’s manifestations were proof that their goodness was inherent. The way Ēshva’s thoughts in their pov chapters continually focused on flashbacks to their trauma or worrying about the harm their manifestation could do, rather than their trauma being a mostly unspoken and implicit thing that dogged and shaped their behavior, flattened their character a bit.
For example....if someone assumed that Ēshva was afraid of hurting people with their manifestation, only for them to subvert this by saying that they were actually pretty sure they could control their manifestation just fine — it was the proof of what it said about their soul that was the problem, it would fit the general pattern of unexpected characterization turns that sets this series apart: the way Tamar’s desire to look at God had no utility behind it, the way Lucifer’s fall had no moral disagreement behind it, the way Celyet’s difficulties with words or Yenatru’s deep gentleness etc hide vast implications. These all carefully avoid common popular superpower tropes and arcs. Not avoiding it definitely doesn’t ruin the character of Ēshva themself, but it does make the prose in many of their pov scene run abnormally thin compared to other parts of this series.
Not going to lie I was disappointed when I realized that this book had a different cast of characters from the first book, but I’m really glad I got around to reading it anyway, because it really makes clear that the ‘main plot’ of the series isn’t tied down to one group of characters, this new cast has a totally different arc that opens up some totally different ideas. It also really resolves or satisfies a bunch of the things I felt were kind of underdone and not focused on enough in The Stars, so that was satisfying. Although on balance, I think this book has a bit of ‘second in a trilogy syndrome’ with feeling less full and strong than the first, the cliffhanger at the end makes up for it.
I absolutely LOVED the character of Celyet, my new favorite character in this series so far and one of my favorite new ones I’ve met in new fiction in a while. Yairēn was also the type of character who, a little like Elīya from The Stars, started out kind of annoying/frustrating but wound up very very likable through the sympathy of the writing.
I have two main criticisms of this book that made me lower it to 4 stars instead of 5:
The first, which is something that might well wind up working out fine by the next book, is some parts of the characterization of God. I really really liked the intense, wordless, extremeness-of-a-certain-way-of-being in both this book and the previous one, I definitely have no issue with that. The issue is that after the reveal that other gods are possible, that Celyet and Ēshva identify as gods, and that God doesn’t know this yet.......well, in retrospect some of the more jocular and condescensing parenting-a-toddler discussion of God hits different: it’s no longer so much a deliciously Jewish-y joking about an unparalleled and singular power of the universe where people must struggle with God and only with God. Instead it feels a little cheap, as if the only justification for having other gods is because the one they have now has the intellect of an animal and is incapable of having complex thoughts or reflections. (Which is not needed! The argument made in this book spans multiple chapters and is VERY well articulated, the most intelligently discerning and perfect God could not render the argument moot). If God is as toddler-like and incompetent at their job of understanding people’s arguments as Jibril (perhaps simply in jest, or unreliably, but perhaps it is supposed to be taken seriously) suggests, and, if God can’t even understand what a god is.....it’s hard to see why the characters inside this world would think the reveal that other gods are possible is a big deal, and hard to understand why it is still an unheard-of concept for this world all after so many millennia.
Don’t get me wrong, here as in the first book there are still scenes and quotes that do give a powerful impression of God as so extreme and unique-seeming that you can see why no one inside this world thinks there can be another one—Celyet and Lilith’s whole conversation, Jibril and Ēshva’s exchange about the beginning of the universe on the mountain, the flashback to the manic ecstasy of many holies. But then these get repeatedly backtracked and undercut, as if the author is afraid that making God too cool will make other gods seem less cool, whereas I think it’s the other way around. If Jibril was deliberately keeping the idea of other gods a secret from God, for example out of concern either God or humanity couldn’t survive it, it would have been so much better. Of coiurse it may turn out my impressions were totally wrong by the next book. But if so, ironic that so much of the book surrounded Celyet’s agony over the idea of other people’s misinterpretation and twisting of her.
My second and more concrete criticism of this book is the character of Ēshva. It’s not that I didn’t like them or their backstory, but the way they were written felt a little too “typical” a character for this series. I feel like characters who are simply afraid of their own powers are a bit overrepresented in scifi/fantasy and superhero stories, and the best parts of Ēshva’s pov chapters were the ones that instead focused on the truly agonizing awareness that their manifestation was proof their soul was “bad” and that this perceived badness was in fact inherent, just as Celyet, Elīya, and Yenatru’s manifestations were proof that their goodness was inherent. The way Ēshva’s thoughts in their pov chapters continually focused on flashbacks to their trauma or worrying about the harm their manifestation could do, rather than their trauma being a mostly unspoken and implicit thing that dogged and shaped their behavior, flattened their character a bit.
For example....if someone assumed that Ēshva was afraid of hurting people with their manifestation, only for them to subvert this by saying that they were actually pretty sure they could control their manifestation just fine — it was the proof of what it said about their soul that was the problem, it would fit the general pattern of unexpected characterization turns that sets this series apart: the way Tamar’s desire to look at God had no utility behind it, the way Lucifer’s fall had no moral disagreement behind it, the way Celyet’s difficulties with words or Yenatru’s deep gentleness etc hide vast implications. These all carefully avoid common popular superpower tropes and arcs. Not avoiding it definitely doesn’t ruin the character of Ēshva themself, but it does make the prose in many of their pov scene run abnormally thin compared to other parts of this series.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 27, 2024
This book is odd as hell, and one of the psychologically strangest and most divided against itself I’ve read recently. It’s definitely of the category of ‘odd, half-formed, and weaker middle installment of a trilogy’ but in a way that’s extra odd in this series, because the most crucial plot and world building information of the entire series is contained in mostly the last 1/3rd of this book (and in a single throwaway phrase around the mid-point), only after it does its best to bore the audience into dropping it. I’ve heard this is a tactic Umberto Eco employed deliberately, to whittle the readership down to only those who’ve gotten through it, but I doubt it was deliberate here. The weakness is closer to what I’d call ‘boilerplate’ — except for the parts of the book that are absolutely not boilerplate in any way shape or form, and are in fact some of the best writing, of any kind, I’ve ever seen in my life. Are in fact things I’ve never seen stated anywhere else, in any manner. Maybe never in the history of religion.
We open with Eshva, a demon, who is 12 years old. As clarified but not elaborated on in The Stars That Rise At Dawn, demons in Sehhinah are people who were taken from their families as young children by the entity Lilith, who queers the human/inhuman binary by making herself immaterial and immortal due to a never-repeated-again machination of extremely creative Theurgy and interlocking of God’s power. However, the reason children are stolen from their homes and made into demons is to rescue them from abuse and abandonment. No one in Sehhinah quite comments on this — after all, it’s completely normal to them and has been for millennia — but in dialogue with the real world family institution and real world legend of Lilith (and global ubiquitous stories of baby-stealing entities), it ranks as one of the most clever comments I’ve seen in a long time. The fallibility of such a system — placing the power to decide who should be taken from their families or not in the hands of a single woman who lived millennia ago in an age and society totally unlike the current one — is never quite meditated upon either, but in a somewhat odd choice, exploring demonhood and the demon system is not even close to a main subject of this book.
But demons are the main characters. Eshva, the 12 year old demon, does an impressive feat of Theurgy in the prologue, creating a conflagration of electric sparks and arcs around their hand, which increase in intensity the harder they focus on their sense of themself. Immediately afterwards, the joy of this creation and impulse is shattered, as it turns out, which they didn’t anticipate (being 12 and all), that this means they are a walking electrocution hazard, unable to touch anyone without seriously injuring them, and dangerous to be near if they are not dissociating from themself. Quite impressive in the elegance of its horror.
Ten years later, a different demon, from the same region but a different settlement, named Celyet, is 17 (so an adult). Also a gifted Theurgist, she has created a highly realistic creek, only for her fellow demons to bathe in it, unaware that it is her soul, or that it is Theurgy at all. Broken up by this, she flees the camp for the nearby city of Akal-ne. Where, as it turns out, Eshva is working as a coffeeshop barista, having somehow manifested a glove that suppresses their electricity, and rather halfheartedly dating a regular human woman, Yairen, the quietly browbeaten and insecure youngest daughter of a prestigious trading family. Yairen suddenly asks Eshva to teach her Theurgy, bringing up their old trauma in full force.
After a bewildering day of trying to figure out the social systems and bureaucracy of human society, Celyet tries to recover in a coffeeshop — the one Eshva works at. Here comes an odd, long, and fascinatingly tender scene, where Celyet does something that ought to be routine and casual to most people — tries to order a drink at this shop. Somewhat in the vein of Yenatru and Eliya’s strangely and unexpectedly tender interaction over the revealing of Yenatru’s manifestation back in Stars. The pacing slows to a careful, blow-by-blow sequence of emotions and thoughts, turning on Celyet’s exquisite sensitivity, neurodivergence, alienatedness, and terror of being misinterpreted; combined with Eshva’s paranoia, forced distancing of themself, and clumsy desperate kindness. It’s a surprisingly engrossing and intimate sequence of writing, and does a lot of literary work in infusing depth into the first two thirds of the book. This type of scene does not recur in this book, but does to some extent in the third book.
Soon after, this is interrupted by the angel Jibril, who is the owner of the coffeeshop (named “Jibrew”) strolling in. This kind of thing is really a delight of the series. Everyone knew Jibril owned it, but they’d been off-planet for years, and none of the main characters had ever seen them. The over-the-top, ostentatious, and sharply-precise and carefully-considered attention to every detail and design choice of their design is truly magnificent:
Jibril immediate starts to talk, and slowly makes everyone, especially Celyet, irritated beyond belief, but with some extremely interesting worldbuilding and cosmological history details for the readers. Celyet starts focusing on her own soul, her own calm and rich flowing river-ness, and then, by accident, so easy is this for her, she manifests a river of her soul in the middle of the coffeeshop. Theurgy cannot be undone, so now she’s stuck with the horrifying prospect of her soul being permanently and uneradicatably plopped in the middle of a public place of business. Jibril however, persuades her that they will protect it, and her, from disturbance, and hints to her that there’s something unusual about her.
After Eshva and Yairen’s respective personal issues continue, accelerated and fueled by Celyet’s manifestation event that happened before their eyes. Pondering herself makes Yairen dissolve into tears and self-loathing, and pondering Celyet’s beautiful, non-dangerous manifestation makes Eshva stiff with envy and a different type of self-loathing. Eventually that night, Jibril bullies Eshva into taking a trip up to a mountain so that they can ‘chat’ about their issues. This isn’t over any more interesting than the stuff that has been happening since the strange tender magnifying-glass-eye view of the coffee-ordering sequence, but it casually contains a passage that blew me out of my chair:
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this idea for the creation of people/souls in any other fiction, nor in any jewish or christian or muslim theology or philosophy I’ve read. Things partial and slightly overlapping with this yes, but not this particular combo. Unless it was phrased in so different a manner that I forgot the earlier one and therefore can’t compare it to this. The way it fits in with the worldbuilding of Theurgy is insane. Yet it’s presented quite casually, and responded to without any amazement or confusion — as if society already has a long, surface-level familiarity with the concept, such that people rarely if ever stop to contemplate how astonishingly full of wonder and implications this is.wonder and implications it is.
While this is happening, Yairen decides that she’s too worthless to make anything of herself, and that somehow, a possible way out of this is to become a Holy. Comparing each sentence her thought process and motivations and the entire sequence of her reactions, beliefs, and desires; to Tamar’s in the previous book, is fascinating, right down to the fact Tamar desires to ‘see God’ while Yairen desires to ‘be made Holy’. God makes this one appearance in this book, and it’s to be deeply unimpressed with Yairen’s motivations and refuse her. But a two-fold communication barrier is instantly hit — the difficulty of understanding Their complex, nonverbal communication, and Yairen’s hair-trigger projections and jumping to conclusions that seem to hit every flavor of misinterpretation that Celyet was so afraid of being directed at herself earlier in the book.
And then immediately after this, consumed by panic and suicidality, Yairen decides that the only thing that will calm her down is to bathe in Celyet’s soul. She doesn’t really seem to notice this is almost the same thing as being made a Holy, just as neither Yenatru nor Eliya nor Lucifer ever made the connection between it and the scene of Eliya being kissed by Yenatru’s manifestation. But it’s an incredible description of Celyet’s soul.
The book continues rather normally weaving in between these occasional shockingly intense scenes whose implications go unnoticed by the characters, but setting up a fast-moving, yet natural-feeling polyamorous romance between the three main characters. Until finally, it’s established: these connections are not unnoticed. Jibril has been brewing these connections in their mind for a long long time, maybe centuries, but for some reason has been refusing to announce the idea to the world at large. The answer is,
And then one between Celyet and Jibril, where Jibril informs Celyet of their theory and the logic behind it. This is the location, finally, of what I mentioned at the beginning of this review — some of the best writing, of any kind, I’ve ever seen in my life. Are in fact things I’ve never seen stated anywhere else, in any manner. Maybe never in the history of religion.
It’s not very informative to excerpt explanatory elements of this second conversation, however, because it’s so tightly bound up, and already pretty much is the minimum amount of explanation required to convey this info — a full chapter, an evocative but still incomplete part chosen at random:
The final parts of the book need less analysis, since being a middle book, it ends without much being wrapped up, but more open to suspense.
As stated before, this book is really weird. If Stars is geologically layered and full of spurs of different types and densities of rock thrusting through one another, Birds is like huge hunks of pure gold dumped in a lake of concrete. Excavating the gold is not difficult, neither to find nor to dig out, if someone tells you there’s gold in there, but it is basically completely unsignalled and there’s plenty of concrete under and between the hunks of gold too. Like a guilty criminal’s ploy to hide their gold from the cops.
Despite how terrifying Eshva's backstory impetus in the prologue is, the focus on the surface level, most obvious issue with their manifestation — the danger it poses — is in fact treated as the full problem and analysis of their issues. Not, for example, a thin veneer covering a genuinely deeper issue, like, say, ‘who the hell am I, that such a thing as this is my soul in the first place?’ Yairen is more meaty, but a part of her arc — when Celyet teaches her Theurgy — engages in a similar surface level solution. Her terror is that when she tries to feel her soul, she feels nothing but howling emptiness. Her eventual manifestation winds up being a pair of wings she can fly upon. But the bridge between these is not a clever leaning into this emptiness — perhaps your soul is a howling open gap full of empty air, the necessary conditions for flight — but a more simple ‘no just reach further, and you will find a spark instead of this empty space’, and she does. I bring these specific ideas up because both these deeper hints — the flutter amid emptiness, or the horror of what their manifestation proves about their soul — are present. But unlike in Stars, where the many facets of different angles and possible frames and speculations that Eliya thumbs through about her soul all build and jostle together to form a larger structure, the Theurgy in Birds is rather straightforward.
These takings of a road more well-traveled rather than jumping at the opportunity to dodge it and/or to leapfrog it into a much more interesting and odd psychological thicket are a bit at odds with the rest of the series. None of this was handled or written poorly, but it felt strange and almost feint-like coming from this author, to spend so much time on such trope- and genre-conforming storylines. It also felt less psychologically interesting and revealing than any of the uncomfortably wrestling twisting and turning characterization in Stars coming from the author struggling to let her ideas exist. Or for that matter, in the character of Celyet. Perhaps there was some extent to which Celyet and Jibril are the clear core characters of the main thematic point of the book, but either holding to this extremely tiny cast, or expanding the cast to strange peripheral characters that appear in the book only briefly, like Tan Coat Guy and his unnamed sister, or young children, or Lilith, was not in the cards for this series’ unusualness at the time of writing.
Speaking of Lilith, I was somewhat let down by how non-central to the plot the demon system and its impact on society and theological place in the world was. It means that demons remain one of the most significant loose ends to the worldbuilding; the other one being the history of this world and the evolution of its society over the many millennia of theologically ‘status-quo’ development. Neither of these are exactly essential for the core arc of the series or its fulfillment in the final book, but elaboration on them would have likely made a better use of middle-book pagecount than some of those pages were spent on instead.
We open with Eshva, a demon, who is 12 years old. As clarified but not elaborated on in The Stars That Rise At Dawn, demons in Sehhinah are people who were taken from their families as young children by the entity Lilith, who queers the human/inhuman binary by making herself immaterial and immortal due to a never-repeated-again machination of extremely creative Theurgy and interlocking of God’s power. However, the reason children are stolen from their homes and made into demons is to rescue them from abuse and abandonment. No one in Sehhinah quite comments on this — after all, it’s completely normal to them and has been for millennia — but in dialogue with the real world family institution and real world legend of Lilith (and global ubiquitous stories of baby-stealing entities), it ranks as one of the most clever comments I’ve seen in a long time. The fallibility of such a system — placing the power to decide who should be taken from their families or not in the hands of a single woman who lived millennia ago in an age and society totally unlike the current one — is never quite meditated upon either, but in a somewhat odd choice, exploring demonhood and the demon system is not even close to a main subject of this book.
But demons are the main characters. Eshva, the 12 year old demon, does an impressive feat of Theurgy in the prologue, creating a conflagration of electric sparks and arcs around their hand, which increase in intensity the harder they focus on their sense of themself. Immediately afterwards, the joy of this creation and impulse is shattered, as it turns out, which they didn’t anticipate (being 12 and all), that this means they are a walking electrocution hazard, unable to touch anyone without seriously injuring them, and dangerous to be near if they are not dissociating from themself. Quite impressive in the elegance of its horror.
Ten years later, a different demon, from the same region but a different settlement, named Celyet, is 17 (so an adult). Also a gifted Theurgist, she has created a highly realistic creek, only for her fellow demons to bathe in it, unaware that it is her soul, or that it is Theurgy at all. Broken up by this, she flees the camp for the nearby city of Akal-ne. Where, as it turns out, Eshva is working as a coffeeshop barista, having somehow manifested a glove that suppresses their electricity, and rather halfheartedly dating a regular human woman, Yairen, the quietly browbeaten and insecure youngest daughter of a prestigious trading family. Yairen suddenly asks Eshva to teach her Theurgy, bringing up their old trauma in full force.
After a bewildering day of trying to figure out the social systems and bureaucracy of human society, Celyet tries to recover in a coffeeshop — the one Eshva works at. Here comes an odd, long, and fascinatingly tender scene, where Celyet does something that ought to be routine and casual to most people — tries to order a drink at this shop. Somewhat in the vein of Yenatru and Eliya’s strangely and unexpectedly tender interaction over the revealing of Yenatru’s manifestation back in Stars. The pacing slows to a careful, blow-by-blow sequence of emotions and thoughts, turning on Celyet’s exquisite sensitivity, neurodivergence, alienatedness, and terror of being misinterpreted; combined with Eshva’s paranoia, forced distancing of themself, and clumsy desperate kindness. It’s a surprisingly engrossing and intimate sequence of writing, and does a lot of literary work in infusing depth into the first two thirds of the book. This type of scene does not recur in this book, but does to some extent in the third book.
Soon after, this is interrupted by the angel Jibril, who is the owner of the coffeeshop (named “Jibrew”) strolling in. This kind of thing is really a delight of the series. Everyone knew Jibril owned it, but they’d been off-planet for years, and none of the main characters had ever seen them. The over-the-top, ostentatious, and sharply-precise and carefully-considered attention to every detail and design choice of their design is truly magnificent:
…and there’s places where [the skin] glows, somehow. There’s something shifting under there, almost: for a second Yairēn can almost catch the shape and glow and feel and even slight blueness of a lick of flame under their neck.
And with a last step—bells, bells—this person’s hair, some shade of light gold and straight, wafts forward, almost over the counter as if drawn there. And Yairēn manages to look up, away from the hair and hand and the fingers coiled against the counter, at moments seeming too to glow, and at their face.
That’s a mistake, because she makes eye contact.
The eyes are too bright—not glowing, but just bright and sharp and clear in a way that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t seem possible, like when a camera lens is perfectly focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else but Yairēn isn’t looking through a camera, she’s looking through her eyes. And this person’s eyes, some clear and perfectly smooth shade of light orange, are more in focus than just about anything in the world ever seems to be.
Jibril immediate starts to talk, and slowly makes everyone, especially Celyet, irritated beyond belief, but with some extremely interesting worldbuilding and cosmological history details for the readers. Celyet starts focusing on her own soul, her own calm and rich flowing river-ness, and then, by accident, so easy is this for her, she manifests a river of her soul in the middle of the coffeeshop. Theurgy cannot be undone, so now she’s stuck with the horrifying prospect of her soul being permanently and uneradicatably plopped in the middle of a public place of business. Jibril however, persuades her that they will protect it, and her, from disturbance, and hints to her that there’s something unusual about her.
After Eshva and Yairen’s respective personal issues continue, accelerated and fueled by Celyet’s manifestation event that happened before their eyes. Pondering herself makes Yairen dissolve into tears and self-loathing, and pondering Celyet’s beautiful, non-dangerous manifestation makes Eshva stiff with envy and a different type of self-loathing. Eventually that night, Jibril bullies Eshva into taking a trip up to a mountain so that they can ‘chat’ about their issues. This isn’t over any more interesting than the stuff that has been happening since the strange tender magnifying-glass-eye view of the coffee-ordering sequence, but it casually contains a passage that blew me out of my chair:
“Y’know, that sounds pretty ironic, since I’m guessing that’s not your problem, thinking you’re too little. It’s not worth it, you know that, right? Being afraid of yourself, I mean. Because—do you know why God, maker of Something-out-of-Nothing, stretched themself to the absolute limit to make something not from Their soul, to break the rules of Theurgy more than anyone has since, only possible for Them because Their nature is Something-out-of-nothing—why They, famously lazy, put so much effort into inviting entirely other souls to exist, first the angels and then you humans? Do you know why?”
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this idea for the creation of people/souls in any other fiction, nor in any jewish or christian or muslim theology or philosophy I’ve read. Things partial and slightly overlapping with this yes, but not this particular combo. Unless it was phrased in so different a manner that I forgot the earlier one and therefore can’t compare it to this. The way it fits in with the worldbuilding of Theurgy is insane. Yet it’s presented quite casually, and responded to without any amazement or confusion — as if society already has a long, surface-level familiarity with the concept, such that people rarely if ever stop to contemplate how astonishingly full of wonder and implications this is.wonder and implications it is.
While this is happening, Yairen decides that she’s too worthless to make anything of herself, and that somehow, a possible way out of this is to become a Holy. Comparing each sentence her thought process and motivations and the entire sequence of her reactions, beliefs, and desires; to Tamar’s in the previous book, is fascinating, right down to the fact Tamar desires to ‘see God’ while Yairen desires to ‘be made Holy’. God makes this one appearance in this book, and it’s to be deeply unimpressed with Yairen’s motivations and refuse her. But a two-fold communication barrier is instantly hit — the difficulty of understanding Their complex, nonverbal communication, and Yairen’s hair-trigger projections and jumping to conclusions that seem to hit every flavor of misinterpretation that Celyet was so afraid of being directed at herself earlier in the book.
And then immediately after this, consumed by panic and suicidality, Yairen decides that the only thing that will calm her down is to bathe in Celyet’s soul. She doesn’t really seem to notice this is almost the same thing as being made a Holy, just as neither Yenatru nor Eliya nor Lucifer ever made the connection between it and the scene of Eliya being kissed by Yenatru’s manifestation. But it’s an incredible description of Celyet’s soul.
The book continues rather normally weaving in between these occasional shockingly intense scenes whose implications go unnoticed by the characters, but setting up a fast-moving, yet natural-feeling polyamorous romance between the three main characters. Until finally, it’s established: these connections are not unnoticed. Jibril has been brewing these connections in their mind for a long long time, maybe centuries, but for some reason has been refusing to announce the idea to the world at large. The answer is,
And then one between Celyet and Jibril, where Jibril informs Celyet of their theory and the logic behind it. This is the location, finally, of what I mentioned at the beginning of this review — some of the best writing, of any kind, I’ve ever seen in my life. Are in fact things I’ve never seen stated anywhere else, in any manner. Maybe never in the history of religion.
It’s not very informative to excerpt explanatory elements of this second conversation, however, because it’s so tightly bound up, and already pretty much is the minimum amount of explanation required to convey this info — a full chapter, an evocative but still incomplete part chosen at random:
The final parts of the book need less analysis, since being a middle book, it ends without much being wrapped up, but more open to suspense.
As stated before, this book is really weird. If Stars is geologically layered and full of spurs of different types and densities of rock thrusting through one another, Birds is like huge hunks of pure gold dumped in a lake of concrete. Excavating the gold is not difficult, neither to find nor to dig out, if someone tells you there’s gold in there, but it is basically completely unsignalled and there’s plenty of concrete under and between the hunks of gold too. Like a guilty criminal’s ploy to hide their gold from the cops.
Despite how terrifying Eshva's backstory impetus in the prologue is, the focus on the surface level, most obvious issue with their manifestation — the danger it poses — is in fact treated as the full problem and analysis of their issues. Not, for example, a thin veneer covering a genuinely deeper issue, like, say, ‘who the hell am I, that such a thing as this is my soul in the first place?’ Yairen is more meaty, but a part of her arc — when Celyet teaches her Theurgy — engages in a similar surface level solution. Her terror is that when she tries to feel her soul, she feels nothing but howling emptiness. Her eventual manifestation winds up being a pair of wings she can fly upon. But the bridge between these is not a clever leaning into this emptiness — perhaps your soul is a howling open gap full of empty air, the necessary conditions for flight — but a more simple ‘no just reach further, and you will find a spark instead of this empty space’, and she does. I bring these specific ideas up because both these deeper hints — the flutter amid emptiness, or the horror of what their manifestation proves about their soul — are present. But unlike in Stars, where the many facets of different angles and possible frames and speculations that Eliya thumbs through about her soul all build and jostle together to form a larger structure, the Theurgy in Birds is rather straightforward.
These takings of a road more well-traveled rather than jumping at the opportunity to dodge it and/or to leapfrog it into a much more interesting and odd psychological thicket are a bit at odds with the rest of the series. None of this was handled or written poorly, but it felt strange and almost feint-like coming from this author, to spend so much time on such trope- and genre-conforming storylines. It also felt less psychologically interesting and revealing than any of the uncomfortably wrestling twisting and turning characterization in Stars coming from the author struggling to let her ideas exist. Or for that matter, in the character of Celyet. Perhaps there was some extent to which Celyet and Jibril are the clear core characters of the main thematic point of the book, but either holding to this extremely tiny cast, or expanding the cast to strange peripheral characters that appear in the book only briefly, like Tan Coat Guy and his unnamed sister, or young children, or Lilith, was not in the cards for this series’ unusualness at the time of writing.
Speaking of Lilith, I was somewhat let down by how non-central to the plot the demon system and its impact on society and theological place in the world was. It means that demons remain one of the most significant loose ends to the worldbuilding; the other one being the history of this world and the evolution of its society over the many millennia of theologically ‘status-quo’ development. Neither of these are exactly essential for the core arc of the series or its fulfillment in the final book, but elaboration on them would have likely made a better use of middle-book pagecount than some of those pages were spent on instead.
February 24, 2023
Big heads up: while the themes and concepts that are explored in this book are important to the series and to the third book, the cast of characters is totally different from The Stars That Rise At Dawn, and from a totally different region of the world. I'm a little torn about how well it worked. On one hand, I'm not sure the storyline needed here would have worked with the characters from book 1. On the other it was sort of a letdown and readjustment period trying to adapt to these new characters instead, when the thematic payoff only really comes about near the end of the book, when their arcs are basically done. Additionally I didn't find Eshva and Yairen very interesting -- their arcs were pretty predictable and simple compared to the mysteriously messy strangeness of the characters in book 1, and the peripheral characters of Yairen's family members were totally flat. Jibril was VERY annoying, although not in a way where I found them poorly-written or poorly-suited to the story, they're just an annoying person I think. The character of Celyet is who I enjoyed by far the most. She had an unusual, mysterious tangle of messy internal issues and agonies with a slow, deep, riverlike nature (as her theurgy shows) that felt worthy of her arc's conclusion, revealing that she is actually a God without knowing it.
This reveal from Jibril to Celyet, and Celyet's debate right before it with Lilith about trying to define who God even is, and what makes Them be God, and why They could be God, and this sequence's later aftermath with the polyamorous coming-together of the characters in Celyet's holy river, was by far the best part of the book. I was very impressed by the attention to, understanding, and portrayal of the world-destroying and world-creating significance and emotional vitality of the tiniest nuances and tremblings of the soul. A microscope view of a nutrient-dense river full of tiny lifeforms!
The demons and Lilith in general seem too narratively underdeveloped in examining their impact as a force in shaping society. The implications of a force like this with this much power being around for this long should be huge and deeply integrated into people’s understanding of the world, as done much better with stuff like theurgy and holies, God, and angels/fallen. Understandably it’s not the series focus, but it’s strange for them to be in the series at all if they’re not more developed, since this world is not really an ‘open world’ setting, the number of discrete fantasy elements are limited.
While I may have found Jibril annoying I think many a reader will love them, a constantly-babbling angel with a fascinating physical appearance/composition. The brief appearance of God, like Their appearances in book 1, also were delightful. God here is not the Christian God, capable of 'saving' and healing broken people with infinite grace. This God is more like the Jewish God, simply able to make a two-sided binding partnership with people -- if they will provide x, God will provide y. This lack of omnipotence, without devaluing the extremity and power of a God's soul, definitely contributes to the cleverness of the explanation of what 'a God' is and why there can be more, since it is a question of identity rather than role or physical powers.
I maybe should have reviewed this before I finished the 3rd book (by far the best) because I'm a little unsure how much of this shows through in this book as opposed to becoming clear retroactively after reading the 3rd, but at least I can say that if this book is a bit of a slog the next one makes it worthwhile.
This reveal from Jibril to Celyet, and Celyet's debate right before it with Lilith about trying to define who God even is, and what makes Them be God, and why They could be God, and this sequence's later aftermath with the polyamorous coming-together of the characters in Celyet's holy river, was by far the best part of the book. I was very impressed by the attention to, understanding, and portrayal of the world-destroying and world-creating significance and emotional vitality of the tiniest nuances and tremblings of the soul. A microscope view of a nutrient-dense river full of tiny lifeforms!
The demons and Lilith in general seem too narratively underdeveloped in examining their impact as a force in shaping society. The implications of a force like this with this much power being around for this long should be huge and deeply integrated into people’s understanding of the world, as done much better with stuff like theurgy and holies, God, and angels/fallen. Understandably it’s not the series focus, but it’s strange for them to be in the series at all if they’re not more developed, since this world is not really an ‘open world’ setting, the number of discrete fantasy elements are limited.
While I may have found Jibril annoying I think many a reader will love them, a constantly-babbling angel with a fascinating physical appearance/composition. The brief appearance of God, like Their appearances in book 1, also were delightful. God here is not the Christian God, capable of 'saving' and healing broken people with infinite grace. This God is more like the Jewish God, simply able to make a two-sided binding partnership with people -- if they will provide x, God will provide y. This lack of omnipotence, without devaluing the extremity and power of a God's soul, definitely contributes to the cleverness of the explanation of what 'a God' is and why there can be more, since it is a question of identity rather than role or physical powers.
I maybe should have reviewed this before I finished the 3rd book (by far the best) because I'm a little unsure how much of this shows through in this book as opposed to becoming clear retroactively after reading the 3rd, but at least I can say that if this book is a bit of a slog the next one makes it worthwhile.
May 26, 2021
I loved this book! The plotline looks like it’s going in a really good direction and the stakes have risen a lot. Looking forward to the next book where the characters will possibly be overthrowing God!! This author continues to be really really good at worldbuilding and getting into the characters’ heads and showing their points of view.
I’m still kind of uncomfortable with the Holy, since it even more than before seems like the society is enabling mentally ill behaviors, like self-harm/vulnerability to abuse and general delusion, although it doesn’t actually happen and it seems like it’s possible it will be overturned along with God in the future in favor of more self-sufficient parameters of theurgy. Lilith is also kind of questionable but seems to have more rules and purposes for what she does, but it’s also very enjoyable how her existence makes the possibilities of this world feel more open and incompleted.
I’m still kind of uncomfortable with the Holy, since it even more than before seems like the society is enabling mentally ill behaviors, like self-harm/vulnerability to abuse and general delusion, although it doesn’t actually happen and it seems like it’s possible it will be overturned along with God in the future in favor of more self-sufficient parameters of theurgy. Lilith is also kind of questionable but seems to have more rules and purposes for what she does, but it’s also very enjoyable how her existence makes the possibilities of this world feel more open and incompleted.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 15, 2021
A book with riveting and unique ideas and a premise I am really invested in continuing when the next book comes out, but a few strange narrative choices. After finishing it I was trying to figure out why the scene about Yairen begging God to burn her bothered me in hindsight, even though it made me very excited while reading it, and I think it’s because it’s a tad weird for a book where an angel messenger is a major mentor character to have a first-hand interaction with God in the middle of the book! Especially since the plot slowly circles and narrows in to finally define and describe God second-hand already. And though it made sense I felt a little bit pettily resentful that the plot refused Yairen’s desire rather than letting her make a huge mistake and deal with it.
I was a little confused in general about the explicitness from the very beginning of Yairen and Eshva’s issues because I expected there to be a twist or subversion of them later in the book, as a subversion was written so perfectly for Celyet. On balance this was a really good book especially given it’s in the middle of a series though. I hope to see Celyet and Jibril again!
I was a little confused in general about the explicitness from the very beginning of Yairen and Eshva’s issues because I expected there to be a twist or subversion of them later in the book, as a subversion was written so perfectly for Celyet. On balance this was a really good book especially given it’s in the middle of a series though. I hope to see Celyet and Jibril again!
July 19, 2025
This book was a delight to read, so many of my hopes and wonderings from the preceding book (The Stars That Rise At Dawn) were satisfied or made even wider by this book. It’s a slice-of-life with a mythological world and some superpowers, in terms of plot. But the characterization is its real strength. It’s very much not about normal people, but neurodivergent and mentally ill ones, and I could feel how much the author understood this from her writing. It even weaves the concept of people who are fundamentally different from most people into the worldbuilding and even mythological message.
I think my favorite in this book was Eshva, whose intrusive thoughts and compulsions born of trauma felt very real, but also the supporting characters of Jibril (an angel with more than a hint of mania or adhd) and Lilith (a clever, child-rescuing spin on the baby-stealing folklore Lilith) and some random barely-mentioned side characters made a big impression, and hilariously enough the character of God continues to be among my favorite in this series. One of my favorite scenes is one where God and a character with a pretty warped idea of what God is attempt to communicate.
I think my favorite in this book was Eshva, whose intrusive thoughts and compulsions born of trauma felt very real, but also the supporting characters of Jibril (an angel with more than a hint of mania or adhd) and Lilith (a clever, child-rescuing spin on the baby-stealing folklore Lilith) and some random barely-mentioned side characters made a big impression, and hilariously enough the character of God continues to be among my favorite in this series. One of my favorite scenes is one where God and a character with a pretty warped idea of what God is attempt to communicate.
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