Copy furnished by Net Galley for the price of a review.

A young boy falls from the sky.  He is mute, but eventually finds his voice with a wooden flute and the magic of music.  There is something very special about this boy.  Myriad worlds in outer space have become established now.  The blue sky overhead may very well be virtual, cherry blossoms no longer exist except in memory and fireworks.  Digital glamour is all around, artificial youth and designer babies are par for the course.  All tempered with a poisonous moon, a smell of hate, a two-tailed cat, and a city of dogs. 

Sci-Fi is not my preferred genre, but I enjoy giving it a go from time to time.  If you like Sci-Fi with a goodly dose of the metaphysical, climb on board and give this a spin.

While I'm not quite sure why the comparison was made to The Bear and the Nightingale (it wasn't really like that at all), I will say The Vanished Birds is an impressive debut. It has more of a sci-fi flavor than I typically prefer in my books, but aside from my personal preference for all fantasy all the time, The Vanished Birds is a well-written and eerie story of unique love, strange science and the connections and choices that drive people apart and bring them together. It's not a feel good story, but rather one of those poignant and somewhat painful books that leaves you with an impression even after you've finished it.
The one thing I can think of that makes it like The Bear and the Nightingale is the lack of full closure or tidy endings. It maybe has that similar mysterious quality where there are just things that will not be answered about the world structure and the characters. You don't find out the whys of several aspects (or even the full backstory of most of the characters, just glimpses), but it is clearly intentional and part of the eerie quality of the story.
The writing is beautiful, neat and clean with no wasted words and the dialogue is absolutely seamless, so the characters and their reactions, alway feel completely real, which I think is the true pull of this book. It's weird and wonderful, but Simon Jimenez did a fantastic job of crafting real, fallible people with complex relationships, although the focus is on Nia and the boy.
I don't know quite how to classify it, but yes, I would recommend it, if you'd like something a bit different.

The prose in The Vanished Birds is beautiful, lyrical even, especially for Science Fiction. The Vanished Birds is the story of a boy who seems to fallen from the sky into a village that produces special seeds for visitors from another place who show up every 16 years to buy them and take them away. The earth isn't doing so well, in spite of efforts to save off environmental disaster and people who have the skills and knowledge to design space stations are highly in demand.

If you like lyrical writing and science fiction and relationships, this is the book for you. Unfortunately, it wasn't the book for me.

A beautiful literary tale that happens to take place in space, The Vanished Birds is a story of chosen family and the lengths one would go to protect the ones they love.

The first few sections had me a bit puzzled... they seemed a bit like extraneous backstories or short stories that accompanied the main novel. Once it all came together, I mostly understood why the backstory was important but still found it a bit unnecessary.

Overall, the relationship between mother figure Nia and son figure Ahro was beautiful and worth the 400 pages. This was a beautifully written debut. I partly wanted more of an ending and wanted to see all the ends tied up but also partly thought the abrupt ending was perfect.

4.5 stars.

Lou Jacobs's Reviews > The Vanished Birds

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
The Vanished Birds
by Simon Jimenez
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Lou Jacobs's review Sep 02, 2019 · edit
it was amazing

A virtual tour de force debut ... although using the science fiction motif , this is a literary novel exploring frienship, love, betrayal and wonder of the fantastic. Filled with a plethora of well fleshed out characters. The main two are female ... Spaceship Captain Nia Imani and aerospace engineer Fumiko Nakajima. Fumiko believes the future of mankind is in the Stars and not on the climate savaged Earth. She is hired by the mega corporation Umbai to design a series of space stations which will provide the platform for the migration of the human race by a series of Arks. Fumiko chooses to pursue her career rather than sustain her burgeoning friendship with lover, Dana. Her space stations are designed with similarities to the form of modern day birds ... she names them: Macaw, Pelican , Barbet and Thrasher. (hence the title ... The Vanished Birds). Colonization of the galaxy is achieved by the development of "cold sleep" ... a lengthy period of suspended animation allowing reawakening in a safer time and better place.
On the farming planet, Umbai-V, a pod crashes with the mysterious appearance of an unharmed mute boy .... who later is given the name, Ahro. Fumiko has a theory that this youth has a unique but undeveloped power, the ability to Jaunt. An ability suspected in rumor and legend ... however, one that she may have experienced in person. The power in which an individual has the ability to travel across galaxies in mere seconds ... perhaps one day Ahro will be able to think of a place, and be there.
Fumiko enlists the aid of Nia to take the boy and remain on the fringes of space ... hidden from the claws of Umbai ... and possibly have him develop the ability to "Jaunt". She opines Umbai has been looking into her extracurricular projects for some time and she'd rather they not know about Ahro. "They do not know how to handle good things without breaking or exploiting them." During the journey Nia and Ahro's relationship flourishes from friendship to admiration and then ultimately mutual love.
Simon Jimenez proves to a master storyteller and weaves an intricate and astonishing narrative
pitting multiple forces and motivations against one another. Is greed or love the more powerful force?
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing / Ballantine for providing an Uncorrected Proof of this gem in exchange for an honest review.

The Vanished Birds is a sweeping epic journey through time and space. But it is written in such a gorgeous, almost poetic, way, that swept me away. It is a bit like a novella that leads to a novel, and then leads on to an epic novel, then circles back and leaves you going, "OH." There was a little bit of flipping back and going, wait, "who was that?" But not much, and Nia, Ahro, and the crew on the ship were all very well done with their own voices and characters. Absolutely lovely.

The past hungers for him, and when it catches up, it threatens to tear this makeshift family apart.

Dynamic cast of characters, beautifully written, and fascinating premise.

I can not express how happy I am that I found this book. I have read several Sci-fi books, and I have enjoyed very few of them. This was such an enjoyable book. The characters are fantastic, the found family aspect of it all. Thinking about it, it gave me FireFly vibes a little.

The first few chapters, or the first chapter (they are long chapters), follows a different boy over the course of his life, from birth to his death and the time over the years where he meets Nia and wants to have something more than he as a farmer, but learns that he's not as special as he thought. After his story is done, it follows a different boy (Ahro) and Captain Nia.

This was beautifully written, the characters are all wonderfully diverse. And the plot, while not entirely clear at first is really interesting. There are parts that lag a little, and some of the off-shoots of the plot aren't clear how they fit in with Nia and Ahro, quickly weave together nicely.

Vanished Birds is a mysterious science fiction tale bathed in beautiful prose that offers glimpses of a future of seasons changing, stars within reach, technological marvels, corporate greed, and metaphysical depth.

Starting with a distant world, a colony frozen in time except for brief decades-apart visits from offworlders. You get a strong juxtaposition of the few backward souls living simple lives and the grand civilization out there. A young boy exploding from the stars ✨ changes everything. And, his future appears special. He's mute. He doesn't belong anywhere. But he may just be the one everyone in the cosmos has been waiting for. Or not.

Meanwhile, a thousand years earlier, a designer baby changes everything and puts in motion things unimagined. The question is always what matters most, personal affections or human progress. Is it the job or the relationship that's important? Is loyalty to your friends, shipmates, companions paramount or setting aside a nest egg? Ultimately are we all disposable, interchangeable, useful? And what are the limits of corporate greed? Will it take us places we never thought we'd go?

This is a metaphysical story, not a bang bang shoot em up. It's filled with a sense of wonder and magic. Although I enjoyed it, I'm not certain everyone will.

What I think makes this novel work so well is that you never really know where the story is going. At first, you think one is the main character, but then there's a shift and the story focuses on someone else in another part of he universe becomes the focus. A lot of the story takes place on an aging ship with a motley crew, but it's a few giant steps till you get there. First, you have to flee the dying earth and it's not necessarily fair who gets to go. First, you have to have the oddest extramarital affair imaginable. First, someone has to predict what may come to be.

In any case, the writing is captivating, mystical. And takes the reader on a
One strange trip through ugh time and 🚀 space.

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
The Vanished Birds
by Simon Jimenez
F 50x66
Sherry 's review Aug 18, 2019 · edit
liked it

I soooo wanted to love this. Started out with interesting short stories then morphed into the main story which I found extremely long and tedious. Sort of a space opera on choosing family. A boy is found crash landed on a space station and one of the captains of a space traveling ship wants to adopt despite being told it was impossible. I kept thinking how I would have livened this up a bit. I DNF'D at 75%. I just wasn't interested enough to go on. Arg!