Where Wells wrote a series of four stories that each gave a snapshot of emotional development and then kept them in separate novellas to let them stand on their own and build on each other, Yang has written those separate stories and put them all in one book. In some ways, this is the opposite of the cool technique that Martha Wells used for her first four Murderbot novellas. But chaining those extended short stories together into one novel didn’t feel like it created the narrative cohesion I wanted. Each section felt like an extended short story about that time period in our POV character’s life. Part of my sense of being narratively adrift grew from the way in which the book is divided into sections, with each section separated from the last by a big temporal gap. The book certainly seems to have worked better for other people than it did for me. I’m not sure how much my perspective has been shaped by that prolonged delay, and I can only recommend that you take my review with a grain of salt or three. But that means that I’m writing this from an odd place. I suspect that the biggest cause for that was my own fault: I put the book down about halfway through, and then took over a month to return to it and finish it. The Black Tides of Heaven, by Neon Yang, left me feeling a little narratively unmoored. The author’s name has changed since initial publication, hence the different name on some hard copies and publicity images
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