Speaking Bones by
Ken Liu
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
What a great ending to the Dandelion Dynasty. Liu has created a world so full and complex that it seems impossible that it doesn't exist. Does some of the detailed descriptions of numerous engineering feats get a little contrived and complicated? Yes, but Tolkien's details of fairy life were a little long too. And the results of these contraptions become something beyond imagination, using nature and a little fantasy and using natural laws for human's purpose. In a world without oil or guns, it seems at once more organic and fantastical than our reality. Besides all of the innovations, I loved the explorations of communication--song, word, writings, dance, plays, food--within the cultures, between them, and through time. I loved too, the balance of faith and man's own ability to create through art or science. He explores hard questions about what love is, unity, the greater good, and what leadership looks like. ( I only wish a tiny bit more of Fara and Sovo, after they reunite, but really this epic is already thousands of pages long). Hands down one of the best world-building epics of all time.
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Only when she had lost herself in the stories of the scrublands, when she had abandoned herself to the mores and customs of her adopted people, when she had opened her heart to the austere beauty of another creation myth--only then would she truly find herself.
the palace was not only less; it was in fact no more
it is the act of naming, not the name itself, that is the sign.
The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny