The Vanished Birds

“There is no assuaging the fear that things end and people leave.”

Wow. I'm not sure how to properly review this, and hope that a simple ‘wow' will convey the feeling I have upon finishing this book.

The story... hm. The story revolves around a boy and his found-family. In this universe where travelling long distances in space is done through jumps and lost time (weeks/months/years) for the crew, Nia Imani crosses paths with a boy whose appearance on a backwater planet was sudden and mysterious. He can't speak, has no memory of how he got there, crash landed and naked in a field. The inhabitants of the planet are unsettled, and send the boy off with Nia to find where he belongs. Where he ends up belonging is...complicated. Within him, his bone, his blood, are secrets that put him and everyone around him at risk, and Nia is tasked with keeping him safe as he comes of age. Things get...complicated.

Interspersed with this story are other points of view from other people important to the overall story. Chief among them is the story of Fumiko Nakajima, starting a thousand years before the time of Nia and the mysterious boy, as she develops space travel, folding space, entire space stations, and all sorts of advances that completely alter the landscape of humans in space. High on her accolades, she thinks she can do no wrong as her story intersects with the story of Nia and the boy.

Let's be frank here – there's no big space battles. No dramatic escapes. No last-second rescue attempts. Nothing here that really could be considered Star Wars material. This is very much a character-driven family story, in hard sci-fi space. But what a story. It is beautiful. It is horrible. It is heartwarming. It is heartwrenching.

Wow.