The Bird King
Review of novel by C. Willow Wilson
A light fantasy adventure, with dangers resolved arbitrarily. It is redeemed and made delightful by scattered lyrical passages that make the magic tangible and almost credible.
p. 1 … when she stepped on his shadow with her bare foot, the marble tiles beneath were cold. He might have been there for hours, so lost in God that he had trouble finding his way out again.
p. 9 Her eyes were so black and unflawed that they swallowed the afternoon light without reflecting anything, like a night without stars.
p. 27 … it was the daytime shape of some ungodly thing, a jinn perhaps, who entered and left the harem by turning sideways into the realm of the unseen.
p. 92. Life is a series of near misses… Death happens only once.
p. 155 All children of the banu adam are born with a bit of the First Speech… The language spoken by the angels and the beasts and the jinn before the birth of humankind. Incorruptible knowledge. Helps you see the intersections of things. You call it fitrah in your faith. In nearly all cases, it fades as the child grows up, but for a very few, it doesn’t.
p. 159 Once a story leaves the hands of its author, it belongs to the reader. And the reader may see any number of things, conflicting things, contradictory things. The author goes silent.
p. 184 What is a story but the map of an idea?
pp. 185–186 The thought of leaving entirely, leaving not jsut the siege, the war, the threat of capture, but the world itself …
p. 213 … the stars overhead formed a thick band, like a thread-of-gold sash holding up the garment of the sky.
p. 311 She felt a blade of bright pain travel across the length of her face, and then nothing; not the ominous nothing of the fog, but the end of a sentence, the little moment when a deed is finished and is succeeded by silence.
p. 324 I imagine they died from a failure of imagination … No, it isn’t a place at all. Only an idea with a location. … He could go anywhere he liked, and the unseen would gather to clear his path.
p. 327 …a survivor from a time when the sundering of something from nothing required an act of divine violence.
p. 345 You don’t find anything here. The things you want find you.
p. 353 … a fat, jolly creature that stood no taller than Fatima’s knee and looked, t her eyes at least, like a grog that had undergone several additional metamorphoses on its journey form tadpolehood…
p. 369 Time doesn’t pass, at least not in the sense you mean. It just is. All of it, all at once.
p. 387 … a weapon no longer; its iron barrel, still hot, disappeared in a eulogy of steam.
