“Geometries of Belonging” reviewed
My new Birdverse novelette “Geometries of Belonging” has been well-received so far. As I wrote before, this is a painful and hopeful story for me; I guess it’s just generally emotionally fraught to be showing a close PoV of someone who is so conflicted, someone who has so often been on the receiving end of judgment. It’s good to see the positive reactions - through reviews, tweets, and recommendations.
Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews writes,
“… This is the second story I’ve read in this setting, and this one only gets more complicated, more rich and more fleshed out. It follows Parét, who is a healer of the mind, a man with power but with a deep sense of shame, of guilt, of worthlessness. […] There is so much good here. So much good that I can’t hope to capture it all in this review, but the landscape is so solid, and the setting is magic and raw and Parét is an amazing character to capture it all, to have to examine those things he doesn’t want to. For all that he’s a passive character, a submissive character, he is alive and vibrant and I want more of this. All the more of this, please. Yes. For now, I will have to content myself with waiting for more stories set in this world to come out.” (read the full review here)
Liz Bourke at Tor.com / Sleeps with Monsters writes:
Rose Lemberg’s “Geometries of Belonging” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 1st October 2015) is a prickly, complex sort of story. Its main character, Parét, is a healer of minds, a person with very low self-esteem of their own, who is also in a committed relationship with an important politician. […] Parét ends up in a complicated pickle when the family of one of their lover’s political rivals wants them to “cure” a child-an autistic child-of the family into being a proper granddaughter, rather than the person they really are. The prose is blunt and powerful, the narrative compelling, and the worldbuilding both deep and lightly-sketched, lending an impression of a full world while only touching on what is immediately important.
It is a very enjoyable read, and I thoroughly recommend it.
(read the full review here)
Some kind person added it to the Hugo 2015 nominees wiki - thank you!!
Thank you very much, Charles and Liz, and everybody who has read and recommended the story so far.
Oh, and another one of my Birdverse novelettes, “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds,” is in the Tiptree recommendation list. Thank you, mysterious recommender!
Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.