The Four Profound Weaves

I would have loved if the storyline took a different slant where we know why the profound weaves were so important and how that contributed to the sibling gods. Why sand, songs and bones? I feel like I need to read more of the Birdverse before reading this one to know why Bird is the central focus. I had no problem with being dropped into the world and floundering to figure out the world, but I feel like the foundations of this society is a bit strange.

I liked the foundations for both of the main characters, but I didn't really "get" the world building in this book and why the society feels so strongly about ostracizing nen-sasair if it's truly as fluid as weaving a carpet and transforming to a person's desired gender. How would they have even recognized him after the transformation you know? He probably looked completely different once the sandbirds came for him and he could have moved on to a place where no one knows him?? If the Khana society worshiped Bird, why would they not consider his transformation as a divine gift to be embraced??

I would have liked more character motivation and clearer drive. Uiziya wanted to learn how to weave from death, why could she not have tried earlier? Why did nen-sasair give the collector the weave of hope to release one of his lovers, why was this deal struck in the first place?

With thanks to Tachyon Publishing and Netgalley, who provided me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this book. Maybe the fact that it was set in an existing ‘verse coloured my experience of it - maybe I would’ve understood if I’d read some more of the Birdverse.

The discussion of gender in this book was interesting. One of the two main characters, nen-sasaïr, is a trans man who doesn’t fit in with the other men in his Khana society despite having ‘transitioned’. The other, Uiziya, is a weaver who’s seeking her aunt so she can teach her the fourth weave, the weave of death.

But I had trouble caring about the characters or their ultimate purpose. The writing, too, felt extremely stilted and purple: “of what we had wrought, my lover’s words within the ash, the nature of the weaves, the certainty of hope’s resilience, which is as strong as the certainty of death.”

At times, the worldbuilding was also hard for me to grasp. Why does the Collector/the Ruler of Iyar want to preserve carpets, for instance? What is so important about the four profound weaves? Why would Uiziya sit in a tent for twenty years waiting for her aunt to return? There is also a child that appears rather abruptly to randomly give nen-Sasaïr an incomprehensible message and then leaves.

Moreover, a lot of the story is told through dialogue, especially at the beginning. Nen-sasaïr comes to visit Uiziya and they have a conversation. Then they both leave, and they have more conversation with the aunt, then they go somewhere else, then they confront a villain, then there’s more conversation.

There was no sense of urgency. The stakes of the quest and the exact reasons behind it were never clear to me. Yes, the ruler is evil and he’s killing women, I understand that. But that was revealed later. Events seemed disjointed, as if the characters were just stumbling from place to place- for example, it’s only when Uiziya is taken prisoner that nen-sasaïr discovers what’s happened to his lost lover.

Gender issues: nen-sasaïr’s inability to fit in and the account of his transition were repeated several times. I found myself comparing this to Arundhati Roy’s character Anjum, in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In six paragraphs, Roy captured the yearning ‘Aftab’ felt to be a woman, the exoticism and yet the familiarity of the world behind the kwagbah: ‘I want to be like that, like them.’ On the other hand, Lemberg’ portrayal of nen-sasaïr’s isolation from his peers was scattered over pages and brought up throughout. If it had been condensed it would have read far better.

Positives were great worldbuilding and the diversity of racial and gender identity. The middle of the book was easier to digest than the first quarter, because there was actual action, and the bone scene at the end was well done.