S. Qiouyi Lu

I read this book as a suggestion for Read Harder 2023 and I was prepared to love it. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my hopes, and I found it disappointing in a couple of areas. The writing style is just not to my personal taste - no knock against the author for that one, I've just never really enjoyed the style, call it poetic or literary or whathaveyou. I think that was exacerbated by the feeling that the they wrote the whole thing with a thesaurus at their elbow. I love a robust vocabulary, but it felt forced here.
The plot was a variation on the 1001 Nights idea... much of the book is made up of stories about other events being told between the two main characters. It's a powerful device, but it falls a little flat here. I think because Anima's inner landscape isn't well developed enough. There are signs that the stories are having an effect on her, but because we don't really see her inner monologue well, her eventual action at the end feels formulaic instead of heartfelt.
The fact that this is a novella works against the story here. There is obviously a well-developed and complex world in the author's head, but in the short space, the reader is overwhelmed with geographical, political and social minutiae without the time or space to really embrace it. I haven't looked into it, but it feels as if this is a first published work. I think the world has potential and I hope that they continue to write it in, develop it, and come back with a more fully realized version of it.
All that said, I have read far more disappointing books, and overall I gave this one three stars. If you enjoy the more poetic writing style, it's definitely worth taking this one for a spin.… (more)

It is hard to pull the story inside of a story format in a novella length text. It gets even harder when there are multiple embedded stories. And S. Qiouyi Lu pulls it off effortlessly.

The city of Ora is built from trauma - it makes the lives of its citizens easy and enjoyable and turns them into prisoners - without them realizing it for the most part. The Gleaming, the living network which nurtures and protect the city, have human avatars (or almost human anyway) who can use the network to jump into the minds of animals (real and man-made) and are tasked with protecting the city and its inhabitants. Anima is one of these avatars and as with everyone else, she believes in Ora.

Until things get a bit weird. First she is sent to stop someone from leaving the city which makes her wonder why would someone want to leave Ora and if they do, why would hey not be allowed to? Then a man appears where he cannot be - undetectable entity in a town which knows and control everything. And that man has stories - stories from the world outside of the walls of Ora; stories that don't exactly match with what reality is supposed to be.

So Anima hears the stories and tells her own (in blank verse) and somewhere in between there, things start changing. That stranger's existence should be impossible and yet, here he is and he keeps showing things that should not be, cannot be. All the stories belong to the same world but they are not really connected - they are glimpses into the lives of different people - mostly love stories although most of them are not happy ones. And then there is the job - Anima suffers when she is too late in one of the calls the Gleaming sends her on - and that makes the stories so much more alluring.

It is pretty obvious where the story must go - the author does not leave it any other path. But it is not predictable. Each of the embedded stories could have been a story of its own (or almost a story); weaved together they are like a string of pearls - each of them shining on its own and making a much bigger thing as a whole.

The only thing that somewhat annoyed me in this novella were the pronouns. We never get an explanation of all the differences (or even hints at what they are) and it felt like using a separate pronoun for every person we meet was just an exercise in using different pronouns just for the sake of it, hindering the reading of the text.

Still a good novella (although I found the writing in the embedded stories clearer and better than the one in the framework story).… (more)