REVIEW: In the Shadow of the Ship by Aliette de Bodard
Nightjar, sentient ship and family matriarch, looms large in Khuyên’s past. Disappearances drove teenage Khuyên from it, but death will steer her back.
Now an adult and a magistrate, Khuyên came for her maternal grandmother’s funeral but finds herself unwittingly reliving her past on the decaying Nightjar. Children are still disappearing as her childhood friends once did; and worse, her beloved Cousin Anh vanishes after pleading for her help.
Khuyên sets out to save Anh alongside Thao, a beautiful and mysterious woman who seems to know more than she should about Khuyên and the ship. But saving Anh requires doing what Khuyên couldn’t do before: face her family, face the ship, face her own hopes and fears for the future—a future that might well include Thao, but only if Khuyên can stop listening to the critical voice in her head.
A voice that sounds an awful lot like Nightjar’s…
Dear Aliette De Bodard,
Well that was a gothic and weird. Creepy horror would also work as a descriptor. Yet the novella worked better for me than most of the longer books in the Xuya Universe series have. The shorter length tightens down on the over description in those longer books, the endless repetition about bots, overlays, topknots, and tea tastes, among other things, that slow the action to a crawl at times.
Here a young woman, who has fled from the aging mindship on which she was born, returns to it for her grandmother’s funeral. Khuyen is basically a disgrace to her family as she left before she could be called on as Tribute. It is only gradually made clear to the reader, as well as Khuyen, what this actually is. Khuyen only knows that she’s seen young child relatives disappear into “the dark” of the ship, never to appear again. But by leaving, she has essentially turned her back on duty and her family. By returning, she has put herself at risk. But of what?
When a stranger appears at the funeral and a younger cousin disappears after the funeral banquet, Khuyen realizes that the unease she’s always felt is felt for a good reason. Something horrible has been happening and ready or not, willing or not, she’s got to figure it out and stop it.
As with most Xuya books, it’s plugged into the Universe but not as a sequel and there is also not much background given. Clues and information are slowly dispensed in a world drawn from SE Asian cultures now in space. Deference to Elders is expected and families are tightly knit. Behind everything lurks a terrible war that has destroyed worlds and left only tatters and desperation.
The events of this story are resolved but the greater world is still a mess. The beginning feels slow but then the story accelerates across the second half. I feel that the (very slight) Sapphic element is not needed. But Khuyen accomplishes some self-discovery and learns that her happiness is also important – something that her family has never given her. B-
~Jayne
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