Set on a foreign planet, Vanished Birds begins by telling the tale of Kaeda. Kaeda falls in love with Nia at age 7. There is only one problem. She is an alien from an alternate timeline where Earth lays dead. Unfortunately, she visits Kaeda’s planet only once every fifteen years from his perspective—but only eight months have passed for Nia. Kaeda tells the story of how he ages while she stays in her thirties.

Then one day a ship crashes on Kaeda’s planet with only one survivor. Kaeda is eighty-two but asks Nia to take the young boy back to the center hub of the universe on her ship. Nia agrees. On her ship, Captain Nia and the boy bond. But soon outside forces become interested in the boy. Will Nia be able to protect him?

I loved the beautiful prose within Vanished Birds. The entire novel reads like a barely remembered dream or a forgotten but well-loved fable. The plot is masterful as well. It’s literary fiction dressed in a hard science fiction shell. The nature of family and capitalism are both explored within this marvelous book. It is hard to believe this is a debut novel.

Even though Vanished Birds is not my usual thriller read, it is still one of my favorite stories this year. It is highly recommended. 5 stars!

Thanks to Del Rey Books and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

Wow what a book. Written in a lyrical, beautiful prose as a journey through space and time to a tether that holds a person alive.

At first I had no idea where the story would take me, or what it was about. The mysterious boy in a future completely unrelatable. The people who seem completely unrelated seem to revolve around this kid, that is special in some way but noone knows how or why.

The mystery just seemed to grip me, as I was completely absorbed. It wasn't anything exciting or thrilling, just a story of a young boy finding his way in a world. How he grows up, how he understands the beauty of what a family is, what love is, what joy is. The same for the people that surround him. And then towards the end - the complete and total need to find their way back to each other through a love that only a mother would understand.

It was beautiful, it was like a fairytale that I kept wanting to read and should never end. Add the completely imaginative futuristic world and sci-fi, space travel, and I didn't want anything else. The only reason I can't give this a full 5 stars - it was a lengthy read, with a slower pace, that was sometimes got daunting, even if the story was beautiful at the end.

This story was really difficult to follow. I stuck with it until about half way through, but found myself drifting away from the stiry to try to figure exactly what was going on. It was too much effort to try and understand what was happening. Maybe it was just over my head.

The Vanished Birds is both lovely and perplexing, a science fiction story about space travel and corporate domination that’s also a deeply personal story about love, identity, and home.

The book opens on what we come to learn is a Resource World owned by the ubiquitous Umbai corporation. At first glance, we’ve arrived in a rural, agricultural community that seems quaint and unsophisticated. The people of the village work in the dhuba fields; their crop is collected once every 15 years by the space travelling ships that carry out trade across the galaxy.

A boy in the village, Kaeda, is seven years old when he sees the ships arrive for the first time, and he’s immediately captivated by their beauty as well as by the mysterious allure of Nia Imani, the ship’s captain.

The trick here, though, is that ships travel through Pocket Space, secret folds through time that allow them to travel faster than the time passing on the planets. The fifteen years in between visits to Kaeda’s world take only eight months on Nia’s ship. The beautiful first chapter of The Vanished Birds traces the strange relationship between Kaeda and Nia, as each of her visits reintroduces her to Kaeda at a different point in his life, from boyhood to youth to adult to elder.

Later, a strange boy arrives in Kaeda’s world, seemingly out of nowhere. Mute, naked, and scarred, he’s taken in by Kaeda, but because it’s clear that he’s from elsewhere, he’s then given into Nia’s care.

The story shifts to Nia and her crew as they travel with the boy, trying to unravel his secrets and keep him safe. From here, the plot expands outward. We meet Fumiko Nakajima, the brilliant scientist who leaves behind her strange upbringing on a dying Earth to become the creator of the interplanetary systems of travel that fuel the next thousand years. And we learn more about the end of Earth, the expansion of Umbai and their tight control, and the different concepts of space travel.

But what really is essential here is the language and the people. The writing in The Vanished Birds is almost poetic at times, filled with unusual imagery and looping writing. The characters are complex, as are their relationships with time and memory.

While we see the unspeakable cruelty of Umbai and the degradation of the lives considered lesser, the exploitation of the Resource Worlds, and the easy dismissal of the value of life, most of science fiction elements are in soft focus. We learn about the methods of travel, the research institutes and their obscene experimentation, but very little of it is explained in great detail. This book is less hard science fiction and much more a meditation on the meaning of it all.

While beautifully written, at times The Vanished Birds frustrated me, as I do tend to gravitate toward a more literal science fiction approach, and occasionally wanted more straight-forward answers and explanations.

Still, this book overall is an unusual and emotionally powerful read. I think it’ll be on my mind for quite some time, from the almost folkloric beginning to the tragic but inevitable end.

Highly recommended.

Wow! A heart wrenching story that effortlessly travels through time. Everything about this book was spot on. I fell in love with these characters and this book. It tore me into pieces. A truly thought provoking story that reminded me of the need to be wary of advancing techs and a reminder that family does NOT need to be blood related family is only bound by love. An epic sci fi debut. A must read.

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez was a real treat to read. This book is so good that I’m not really sure how to describe. The characters are well written and the over all plot of the story will have you wanting more. This will be one of my top favorite Space Operas of the year.

Thank you, Del Rey, for gifting me this DARC via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. Over all this was a 4.5/5 star read.

The Vanished Birds is such a gem. It's slower paced, but the writing is so gorgeous, the characters so curious,and the world so intriguing that I really didn’t mind spending my time meandering though its intricacies. In fact, I was so sad when it was over, though I was glad that I'd read it of course.

The story weaves through several characters' stories, through different times and on different worlds. Watching the world(s)-building unfurl was just phenomenal! I had no idea where the author was headed with it when I began the novel, but you soon start to put the pieces together and it all just fits perfectly. The worlds are both so like and unlike our own that it's the perfect balance, and speaks to how humanity evolves, but at the core stays the same.

The characters are all so complex as we take these journeys with them. Not only do the characters develop (and develop a lot) over the course of the book, but so too do the relationships. And some not for the better, which is so completely accurate and honest and in line with human relationships in general. It wasn't just friendships, or just romance, or just family; it was every kind of relationship that was explored. From those close relationships to more fleeting ones, their impacts on the characters were showcased brilliantly across the board.

The author explores how we love, lose, grow, change, regress, and simply live as time passes by. Technology changes, our location changes, but how do we? That's the question, and I think that if you can appreciate the slower pace and lovely writing, you'll be glad you took the journey to find the answer.

Bottom Line: I mean, the author made me love a bird book, so that clearly says more than my words ever could.

Let me first state this is not your typical science fiction novel. It has spaceships traveling through pocket space, space stations and colonies, and agreements made between commercial and political authorities, for sure. But these elements, though critical, are handled in a literary science fiction style, focusing on the how the people function within this system and with each other whether in the distant past on a dying Earth or in their present.

The book’s literary leanings show in an omniscient narrator who, while taking on the personality of the character holding the viewpoint, speaks of times before and after as well as outside of the viewpoint character’s knowledge. This omniscience is only broken in one voice, where the narration is revealed through journal pages sent as progress reports, limiting us to the knowledge of that one character.

As the book reaches its climax, the separation of viewpoints shrinks from the length of a scene down to paragraphs moving vast distances as things coalesce. It could be confusing, but I found the structure strengthened the tension and offered both hope and despair simultaneously as the reader teeters on the edge of what might be, praying it will tip to the happier side in the final moments. I won’t give details or even say where things end. That’s for you to discover.

The story begins with a boy raised to a destiny that exists only in his father’s mind. Yet knowing that destiny, the boy takes steps others do not and reaches for the unattainable.

Kaeda is not the most important boy in the story, though. That role falls from the sky, literally, to dump a mystery into Kaeda arms after he has achieved the highest stature possible in his village. The company that owns the colony, the harvest, and the people locks their society in an early agricultural state.

Every fifteen years, winged ships appeared to collect the harvest and return it to the space station, a journey of months for the crew. This brings us to our next perspective, Nia, who captains one of these ships and makes a connection with Kaeda first over music then sex and finally over the boy, who she is to take back to the company.

Kaeda and the boy (who remains unnamed for the majority of the book) have a singsong quality to their narration, a match to the music they share along with a bond to the cheap pipe Nia once gave to a curious boy. With every visit, Kaeda grew 15 years, becoming a young man, a mature one, and then old, while Nia lived less than a year each time, denying her the connection she doesn’t know she wants. The mystery boy comes with her though, giving her someone to love.

I’m telling more of the story than I usually do, but mostly in themes. The narrative is a series of long, dense passages that creep under your skin and ask you to look for the deeper meaning, to understand the psychology and history driving each of the characters. Poignant dialogue and tension-filled pronouncements or cliffhangers break into this narrative, but only for a short while. Instead, it’s the elaborate, but compelling description that pulls you into the story, sometimes lyrical and poetic, at other times self-depreciating with a humorous twist. Together, they paint a vivid picture of what drives humanity and where lines are drawn as much as what compels those who cross. This book is not for every reader, perhaps, and has its darker points, but it also possesses a draw worthy of the right ones.

The narrative moves to the character critical in that moment, sometimes denying rules of time and space to do so. This is never truer than when we meet Fumiko, a brilliant mathematician and designer responsible for the stations that have become humanity’s home, at least for the humanity sheltered by the main corporation. Her story begins back on the dying Earth when she finds love for the first time but cannot claim it. It’s a powerful glimpse at who she was so we can understand who she has become, a driving force striving under the thumb of the company she gave up Dana for a lifetime ago.

This is a story of love, many kinds of love in many places and people, but with love a driving force, whether for good or bad. Sometimes it’s a sexual love, sometimes asexual, sometimes maternal, sometimes one-sided, and at others reciprocated. The connection between them all is the search for connection when distance, inconsistent passage of time, and differing loyalties makes life difficult.

But it’s not just love tackled in these pages. The omniscient narrator allows for the description to reveal philosophy otherwise masked in the day to day. Whether in something as simple as a dismantled rifle or as huge as the desire to shelter the boy from the clarion call of puberty the characters and/or narrative ask you to consider the question more deeply.

The people drive this story in all their strengths, weaknesses, and faults. It calls on the craving for connection, the wish for death on their own terms, the struggle for independence against an overwhelming force, and the appeal of success bought on someone else’s terms but without a fight versus striving for independence you might never win.

Music underlies the story much like it does humanity. The pull home, the communication between people when language is forgotten or different, and the path of remembrance when all is lost. The other thread, though, is stubbornness. Those who strive when they have no reason to believe in their success but are too stubborn to give up. It’s like hope for a driving force but different as well because they’d keep going even when hope had long disappeared behind them.

This book is about people. Little people and ones with power at their fingertips, but people still, arrayed against corporations out to profit with little thought to the cost. It speaks to the cogs in this profit machine who are caught by a single moment of consideration, sympathy, compassion, or even love, and the veil tears from their eyes. Laughable rumor becomes hard truth, acceptable concessions gain too much weight, and people who followed the pattern are driven to step outside it or concede what makes them human.

It’s a powerful, meaningful tale that might not offer an easy or gentle read, for all there are tender moments, but it gives a lot to think about. Some might point to how corporations are demonized, and they are, but nothing I read here has not been done in our timeline on some scale. The question, then, is whether a well-founded picture is held valid by its truth even when offering a harsh view.

The Vanished Birds is an economic and environmental story of those who don’t establish the rules, but live under or break them. It’s working against grand excess at the cost of others, but even so, their choices are made on a smaller scale for much the same reasons: vanity, money, and time. Though tempered by connections made between them and feeling the cost when those who have become family are lost or walk away, it serves to remind us the excess is a matter of scale and distance rather than monsters in the night.

The book is almost hypnotic in its entrancing power. It contains characters from all social and economic strata, different races, and sexual identities. The most important aspect, though, is how the characters are not bland representations of their slot on the chart, but rather people we come to love or hate, and sometimes both.

Whether for its compelling tone, beautiful narrative, underlying messages, interesting people problems, or all of the above, this is a book worth reading on its own and for its reflections of our own times.

P.S. I received this Advanced Reader Copy from the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Since 2014 I have hoped for another book that touched my soul in the way Station Eleven did and I have finally found a worthy successor in this gorgeous novel, The Vanished Birds. It's more than a story; it's a work of art.

This was a great debut book from Simon Jimenez. It read to me like several good short stories that weaved together into one well told story. The opening scene with Kaeda on the farming world of Umbai-V, his interactions with Nia and his growing up felt like a completely different story than the section with Nia and the mysterious boy on the last leg of her long journey but fit together so nicely. Next comes the chapters on Fumiko Nakajima and then Nia's contract and the boy growing up. The sections read differently to me but are a great package when put together.

The characters are so well written and with lyrical prose, this is a surprising science fiction book with things to say on a variety of topics and interesting premise with time and space travel. Like a number of other reviewers, the ending was a little quick and fell a little flat. It felt like some interesting revelations about a character's past was buried in there someplace but I had trouble following, even after reading the last 10 or so pages a few times. This is a small complaint for a really interesting book.

The Vanished Birds is another debut novel, this one by Simon Jimenez. It's a science fiction story of a young boy found naked and uncommunicative on a foreign planet. He is alone and scared in a world he knows nothing about, but is taken in by a villager and kept until a spaceship comes to bring supplies in exchange for their dhuba crops on Shipment Day. The ship's captain takes the boy with her to her next stop, where she is asked to take the boy with her. He is believed to have special powers and she is to watch over his development.



The author's words are so lyrical and the world he creates is magical. It is both heart-wrenching and heart-warming in turns. I found myself taking longer than usual to finish this one because I wanted to savor every moment. I am so excited for Simon Jimenez's voice. He is sure to take the literary world by storm.

Nia Imani had traveled through space, so that years are like months. Friends and lovers continued to age, so all she had left was work and the next paycheck. When she meets a boy that fell out of the sky, he doesn't speak. He communicates via the music he plays on an old wooden flute. There is a connection between them, so Nia takes him in and they become a family. She isn't the only one that wants to keep him, and when the past catches up to them, it threatens to tear their family apart.

The novel opens with the perspective of someone who sees Nia from the outside, so it's almost heartbreaking to see an entire lifetime pass her by. When we switch to her perspective, it's not just the people her team is picking up harvests from, but her family has also grown older and died without her. The small team has only each other to rely on, but even then, her position as Captain sets her apart. There really aren't any good attachments in her life at the start of the novel, even with the mute boy.

As for the boy, his early appearance in the novel is a study of long perpetrated violence toward children. Medical evidence of multiple healed fractures only confirmed my guess at trauma from the way he shied away from people or loud noises, hiding in corners and his inability to speak. The music is disturbing to others when he begins to play, more because transmuting his pain into music invokes memories they would rather forget.

We eventually learn more about what's going on, with shifting viewpoints. The perspective changes aren't always easily delineated, so you really have to pay attention. The history of the people here is fascinating; their distant history of Old Earth is still in our future, with a world slowly dying. Species we take for granted go extinct, resources are scarce, and the surface temperature gradually increases to the point that life is expected to die out entirely. The series of space stations, corporate planets and city planets in their space becomes the new normal, and the nature of people really doesn't change even centuries from now.

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

There is a lot that can be said about relationships, what makes a family and what makes a home. This is tested halfway through the novel in a cold and cruel manner, and the fallout is devastating. We're fully attached to the characters at this point, so their pain is ours, and we long for the same reunion they do. It's a bittersweet final third of the book, and the conclusion is a satisfying one.

“A mysterious child lands in the care of a solitary woman, changing both of their lives forever, in this captivating debut of connection across space and time.”

This is a well crafted book, beautifully written. It’s easy for the reader to become attached to the main characters. Nia is a woman who lives a painfully lonely life, traveling through space in service to her employer. She stays the same age as she travels, while everyone she knows at home grows old and dies. She makes a connection with a strange, young boy who has the potential to completely change space travel. They grow attached to each other and a beautiful friendship develops. However, their world is one controlled by unbridled capitalism. Corporations completely control the use and advancement of technology and they only want to control the boy’s future.

The novel is complicated. Beautiful, heartbreaking, hopeful, lonely, and imaginative. It’s another really good book of the sort that I find very hard to write about. How do you properly convey your feelings about a thing? This is why I’m not an author, and why I so admire people like Mr. Jimenez, who seem to do so with such grace.

I fully recommend this book to anyone who loves science fiction … heck, and even those who don’t.

Song for this book: Total Eclipse of the Heart – Jill Andrews

In sweeping and intimate prose, The Vanished Birds builds a universe from the inside out. The world building is grand, the scale epic, but never alienating. Jimenez has managed what many great world building writers never can - to write a book whose heart is profoundly, achingly human.

Summaries of The Vanished Birds will tell you this is the story of a woman out of her time who takes guardianship of an injured boy and fights to save the family they build. That the book is about that is undeniable, but that is only one face of the prism. This book is about a traumatized boy who finds a home and himself and discovers that the consequences of other people’s greed can be worse than anything he could imagine. It’s the story of a woman born at the end of the Earth whose genius defines humanity’s post-Earth future and who lets her drive and intelligence alienate her from her own heart. It’s a heartbreaking study of dehumanization and a blistering critique of capitalism, colonization, and corporations. But above anything else, it’s a meditation on love - platonic, romantic, unrequited, familial.

Jimenez has proven himself to be a talent to look out for. I can't wait to see what he does next.

This book was such a whimsical, captivating journey from start to finish. In a village, a stranger visits on Shipment Day every few years, until one year, a mute boy falls from the sky. A designer baby (designed with imperfection in mind) creates a future in which visiting distant worlds is possible. While a captain only wants to protect her crew.

The structure and flow of this novel were something remarkable. Many books which I have read in multiple POVs generally announced whose story was to be followed at the opening of every section or chapter. Not in this one. Here, the reader had to trust the magic of Jimenez's captivating prose to move seamlessly from one story line to another. This was especially important in the final part, where plot lines converged and tensions were at their highest.

This trust also came in the world-building. There wasn't too much explanation into how things came to be, and the year in which the story takes place was only mentioned a handful of times. The reader came to understand the technology in the way the characters did, without too much build-up. It really came from the relationships between characters and their tech, which played out marvelous.

In addition, the queerness in this future is refreshingly casual. From the variety of relationships to the inclusion of M. being every character's default prefix, I found this very refreshing. There was no world-building which explained its feature in this novel, it simply just was. In a panel I was on back in October 2019, we dubbed this queernorm and wow, was that normalized here.

If you want a lyrical story about found family and the human dangers of technological advancement, get lost in The Vanished Birds.

I found this book hard to get into in the beginning it picked up a bit towards the middle and then it just became a chore to read. I didn’t like any of the characters and I had a hard time understanding what was going on. It would skip around in stories a lot where I thought I was reading about one person I was actually reading about another. I’m glad I read this all the way through but I really don’t recommend it to anyone.

The Vanished Birds is a metaphysical story with some deep questions that are explored but must be answered by the reader. What is more important, the one or the good of the many? Can this even be answered or is the one and the many’s good both the same? Or are we tricked into believing something is for all of our good when at its core is greed?

At the heart of the story there seems to be a child and the solitary woman who finds and cares for him. Then the story switches going in directions not anticipated. A very deep thought provoking sci-fi story.

While The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez is not exactly a brilliant work, one can see a brilliant mind at work to create this it. This is an author to watch, sure to rise to be one great writer.

An ARC of the book was given to me by the publisher through Net Galley which I voluntarily chose to read and reviewed. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

When I began reading The Vanished Birds, I was unsure what to expect. The blurb didn’t prepare me for the book’s content, and hardly brushed the primary themes. Jimenez explores not just the idea of a found family, but, more importantly, discusses the ways we can be driven to hurt those we love. He has written a severe, yet tasteful, critique of the idea that the ends can ever justify the means.

The novel opens with a sort of extended prologue, set on a resource planet whose inhabitants farm a sweet bean-paste called dhuba. The planet is contracted under the Umbai corporation, who manage nearly all of inhabited space. The planet’s inhabitants have a culture surrounding the highly anticipated Shipment Day, when the representatives of the Umbai corporation come to trade in exchange for the dhuba they’ve harvested and pounded into a delicacy experienced only by the wealthiest on the City Planets. However, it hasn’t always been that way. Once, the people on this planet had a rich, vibrant culture of which dhuba was only a small part. We see that pattern play out across multiple planets throughout the book; the destruction via economic blackmail to force a group to either conform or die. In either case, their culture and way of life is erased.

It’s on this planet and its dhuba that we meet Ahro. He appears as a comet, striking the planet’s surface and coming from parts unknown - and I mean that quite literally. He does not speak their language. In fact, he does not speak at all. The traumas he has endured are, as yet, locked inside him. His appearance causes quite the stir, until the village’s governor, Kaeda, takes him under his wing.

"It was a boy. His body was the only one they found at the site. All else was hot and black. “He was just there,” Elby said, “lying next to the rubble.” Bruised and bleeding, but not broken, the boy was brought to the doctor’s house, where his glancing wounds were cleaned with wet cloth and wrapped in soft bandages. He was a small, skinny thing—no older than twelve. Cheeks gaunt, his flesh so emaciated Kaeda winced, worried that if the boy tried to stand, his leg bones would snap in half. But there was no fear of him standing, for the boy was in a deep sleep, unstirred even by the loud and frantic conversation of everyone around him."

For the first half of the novel, Ahro’s story is primarily told through the eyes of others. First, we follow Kaeda as he grows from a young child into an adult and the governor of his village. Kaeda’s story sets the stage for life on a resource planet, and also serves to introduce us to Nia, the captain of the ship that delivers the dhuba to and from the City Planets. Due to the way that the ships navigate time and space, the time between Shipment Days from the perspective of Kaeda is amplified to become years, whereas only months pass for Nia. The two meet when Kaeda is just a young boy, a child, whom Nia gifts a flute. Years later, Nia meets him as a young man… and they fall, just a bit, in love. Kaeda is unreserved in his love, thinking on Nia incessantly even during the years between their meetings. Nia, however, has been broken several times over and finds it difficult to access that part of herself.

Due to the time compression/dilation that occurs during space travel, Nia has lost everyone she loves and cares for. Her small crew is all she has left in the world, really, though she’s acquaintances with the crew of other ships on similar contracts. However, when Ahro comes into her life, she’s thrown into an open-ended contract that may never end. She’s bonded with the boy, and she has begun to use him as a replacement for the family that she lost. In choosing to stay with the boy, she pushes away the crew that has been her interim family and finds herself again in the company of strangers. In Ahro, however, she finds a companion. His songs speak to her heart.

"She learned his mannerisms. How his right foot tucked itself behind his left leg when he ate, and how he picked at his nails when he was nervous. How he tugged at his hair with impatience—hair that they had by that point sheared off, leaving an inch of black on top—and how, when he dropped a plate or bumped into her or messed up whatever small task she had assigned him, his shoulders would hunch as if braced for a blow. And in these moments, she would catch a glimpse of his past. A history of silence that existed long before the trauma of the wreckage. A learned pain."

In a second thread of storyline that only occasionally overlaps with that of Nia and Ahro, we have the architect of the City Planets: Fumiko Nakajima. The Millenium Woman. Through the use of cold-sleep stasis, she has artificially extended her lifespan far beyond that of a standard human. This, however, comes with a price: each time she is awoken, she’s lost a bit more of herself and of her memories. She’s haunted by dreams of a purple-eyed woman who she knows that, once, she loved. Although she's lost Dana's name, she still feels her presence. When she’s not staving off the phantoms, she’s singularly focused on her projects. Ahro, ultimately, becomes one of them.

"There was a story in Dana’s face—a forgotten myth, of a deer who for one night turned into a man and made love to a human woman by a cold-water brook, in the dark heart of a forest. A strange ancestry that revealed itself in the dramatic contours of Dana’s cheekbones, her jaw—the way the lower half of her face projected forward just a nudge, a hint of a snout, and on that projection, a flattened nose, positioned just above the wide set of her lips."

Fumiko suspects that Ahro harbors a unique ability, based on his manner of arrival on the resource planet. She thinks that he is the next step in humanity’s evolution: he holds the potential to traverse the stars in the blink of an eye. To Jaunt, she calls in, a small reference to King’s short story. However, due to his age and the trauma she’s undergone, she can’t confirm it… which is why she hired Nia to stay with him and care for him at the fringes of the galaxy.

As Ahro’s past is uncovered and the team see more and more of the resource planets, it becomes ever clearer to the reader just how much of an iron grip the Umbai corporation holds the universe in. Enclaves of artisans wiped out when they refused to kowtow to the Umbai corporations demands. Rural communities reduced from rich, vibrant communities to factories whose only use is skinning eels. And so on and so forth.

"For every mistake, a beating. A breaklet wand thrown against the rib, cracking the bone & re-fusing it in moments, leaving behind only the memory of the fracture, the body still able to perform its due tasks. A beating, for not breathing properly. It was a world that valued self-control in all aspects. Even now he could hear it: the peculiar click when the wand extended from its sheath. The red light on its tip, like an eye, and the buzzing sound, like a chitinous bug. When Nia asked him if he was okay, he flinched. “Yes,” he said."

The themes and stories told were shockingly poignant. Everyone has a trauma lurking in their past, which has caused them to make the decisions they do in the present tense. I had expected a magical realism novel with scifi flavor, and instead was treated to the horrors of capitalism run rampant. I highly recommend this book, but be warned that it is not a light or easy read.

3.5 stars. There’s a lot to like here. When I finished the book, I felt that I had just finished listening to a lyrical piece of music (fitting, considering music’s role in the book. That was one of the main things I loved.). The sci-fi concepts were unique and entertaining, and allowed the author to manipulate the timeline in emotionally-effective ways. Immortality, memory…so much going on here! I felt a bit discombobulated in Part I; somehow, the changes in POV seemed rather scattered. But everything started rolling smoothly in Part II.

That said, significant content issues make me reluctant to recommend The Vanished Birds. Child abuse/torture is a critical element of the plot. Promiscuity (largely between same-sex characters), including prostitution, runs rampant. Suicide, drug use, and profanity and vulgarity constitute most of the rest of the objectionable content. In short: this isn’t for kids. And not even for all adults.

The author’s main strength is in the overarching story. I hope to see more of that in the future.

I received a free ARC of The Vanished Birds from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

‘A mysterious child lands in the care of a solitary woman, changing both of their lives forever, in this captivating debut of connection across space and time.’

In a word, Wow! THE VANISHED BIRDS, a time travel Science Fiction book, is Simon Jimenez’s first novel and I loved it! The writing is spectacular, and the story broke my heart. - Highly Recommend!

Thank you, NetGalley and Del Rey Publishing, for loaning me an advance eBook of THE VANISHED BIRDS in exchange for an honest review.

THE VANISHED BIRDS scheduled to release tomorrow, January 14, 2020.