Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin Dying for You by Jenny Frame Harsh Reality by Elle E. Ire What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher BOYS, BEASTS & MEN by Sam J. Miller Bite Me! (You Know I Like It) by Fae Quin Cougar Woods by Tiana Warner All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes
They’re bright, they’re colorful, and they’re doing the meaningful work of ensnaring a potential reader’s eye. These are the boldest and most original book covers of the year, as selected by BookPage’s designer.
Lemberg’s prose is soaked in magic, magic that’s full of space and light and sound. THE UNBALANCING manages to be both ethereal and earthy. Lemberg juxtaposes otherworldly scenes of magic with awkwardness of new relationships. Some of the best scenes in the novel are the clash between Ranra’s Type-A personality with Erigra’s measured introspection. (Lemberg’s portrayal of Erigra’s neuro-divergence is a highlight of the novel). THE UNBALANCING isn’t a book that can be adequately summarized. It can only be experienced.
I adored it. I wish I could break down every theme and character, but I would get lost in the weeds and truly – I’m still sorting them out in my own head. I loved this and deeply recommend it if you want a heavier, more intense read that really grapples with a lot of themes.
Reading THE UNBALANCING was in itself an act of being unbalanced, but in a good way! I could never predict what was going to happen next. Lemberg kept me on my toes. A great read.
Finding a poem by R.B. Lemberg is always reason to celebrate, so I was cheering when I came across their latest in May’s Strange Horizons. “The broken hill and the breath” is a powerful piece about long cycles of harm and healing, about a grove of fruit trees and a fragile peace unfolding around disaster and damage. The piece seems to me to be linked to Lemberg’s upcoming novel, THE UNBALANCING, but even without that added layer of meaning the poem remains deep and satisfying, showing how peace can be shattered, and how it can remain whole all the same.
THE UNBALANCING takes place in the islands of Gelle-Geu, an archipelago where people of all genders exist on a spectrum of sexualities/gender identities. How did you identify the variations and choose the animals that represent them?
Birdverse has been rattling in my head for a very long time, and I no longer remember how exactly I came up with this. I knew there were nonbinary people on the Coast, which is a country does not exist in the beginning of THE UNBALANCING (the novel is set in historical times for Birdverse, about a thousand years before the events of THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES).
Without spoilering too much, the culture of the Coast is directly connected to the culture of the archipelago. I knew that not all countries were accepting of nonbinary people, but it was (and remains) a big thing in Coastal culture. One of my first glimpses into the variations came from an image of one of my characters, who wears a piece of jewelry with a serpent. I asked that character what it meant, and they told me the serpent represented one of the five ichidi variations (my characters tell me things, I am lucky that way). So I started wondering, what are the five ichidi variations, and the rest of the images came to me. I think about nonbinary things quite a bit.
THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES by R.B. Lemberg is a lyrical and complex fantasy novella featuring two elderly trans characters. Uiziya is trying to learn the four profound weaves. She’s mastered three out of the four and lacks the bone cloth. In order to learn how to weave the bone cloth, she needs to go to her aunt Benesret, who is an outcast in the desert who is weaving bone cloth for the evil Ruler of Iyar’s assassins. A nameless man referred to as nen-sasaïr recently changed into a man and is trying to learn about his identity in his heavily gender-stratified culture. He’s also trying to lay some of his past demons to rest. Their two quests both lead them to confront the evil Ruler of Iyar.
Overall this book surprised me with how much I enjoyed it and how powerful my feelings were by the end of the story, it’s emotional for sure and also hopeful and beautiful and tragic and all other emotions that it should not be possible to pack into a small package like this.
J. A. Jablonski for DANTE’S WARDROBE appreciates the soul-bearing THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES.
I am in the end, I guess one might say, a creature of the work, of deep storytelling, and of imagination. In Lemberg’s novella, I find all three. They craft their writing. There is cadence to the sentences, the narrative flow, and the plot itself. They know how language works to deepen the culture surrounding people and their doings. Character names sound real. The words used to describe artifacts, cultural behavior, the sociology of the different peoples all ring true. With regard to the journey that is imagination, Lemberg bends their mind (and heart too, one senses) into that gap between and emerges with the wings of the redwing hawk. This tale seems to have been torn from their soul.
The writing is beautiful, pacing very different from your standard fantasy. I loved getting to know the characters, their journey venturing into a world with bird gods, flying carpets and mountains of bones is so unusual. It takes a slow, thoughtful course, pondering the conflict between change and stability, the cruelty that rigid stability can wreak on the individual.