A Stranger in Olondria

I'm worried that I won't be able to do a review as thorough as this book deserves, because there's a lot going on here and I have turned into a braindead chronically busy person running on pumpkin spice and free apples from Leanbox.

Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria, published by the awesome local Small Beer Press, has recently won the British Fantasy Award, which is what moved it to Spot #1 on my To Be Read ASAP pile. (My TBR pile has an ASAP section that is like... fifty books long. This is why I keep missing my book clubs.) I had bought a copy at Readercon and gotten it signed by Ms. Samatar herself, who is a delightfully friendly and smart lady with impeccable taste in scarves.

A Stranger in Olondria is a ghost story, and a love story, and a story about books. It is the memoir of Jevick of Tyom, the son of a pepper merchant, a boy who loves books and dreams of the day when he will accompany his father to Bain, the capital of the great empire of Olondria, where books are plentiful. Books are not really a thing in Tyom; Jevick only knows how to read because his father hired him an Olondrian tutor, so that Jevick would not be made fun of or ripped off when he became old enough to go to Bain to sell pepper. He had never really intended to turn Jevick into a big old philosophical poetry-loving book nerd, but that is what happened.

Jevick's first trip to Bain does not go at all as planned. He picks up a ghost, the ghost of a willful girl from near his home country who had gone to Bain to seek medical help and died; this attracts the attention of two competing Olondrian religious cults, who each have their own very specific ideas about what happens when someone is haunted by ghosts—or, as the Olondrians call them, angels—neither of which mesh well with Jevick and the ghost's own beliefs.

I don't want to talk too much about the plot, because the plot, while well-executed, is not the only thing going on here. The bare bones of the plot's structure are a classic coming-of-age story, with a lot of stuff about parents and a young rural innocent going to the big city and getting into trouble and becoming the important person they will grow up to be. The basics of the ghost plot are also essentially a classic ghost plot—ghost torments narrator until it is buried properly; at the end, it is buried and the haunting is ended—but a lot happens in between.

The two things that really stick out to me about this book are the worldbuilding and the love of books that's woven throughout it. These two are closely intertwined, often, as much of our narrator's understanding of the world in which he lives comes from having read its literature, and there is an abundance of quotations from various in-universe famous authors about the various places in and around Olondria. The quotations are rich, dense, ornately-worded, and sound genuinely like any sort of adjective-riddled ancient text you've ever read a translation of, full of vivid poetic images that sound kind of random (and occasionally incomprehensible) to modern ears, song lyrics that don't rhyme in English and words that can't be quite translated. It is detailed and thorough and utterly believable.

In my only-middlingly-educated opinion, this book owes a lot more to ancient myth and folklore storytelling traditions than it does to other modern fantasy novels. The language is descriptive and poetic, most of the stuff that isn't quotations isn't quite as dense as the stuff that is quotations, but it has the rhythms and details and long, intricate setups of old stories rooted in oral traditions, back when we had to remember stuff and well before we invented "invisible writing."

If you like reading old folklore and ancient epics as much as you like reading "regular" fantasy novels, A Stranger in Olondria is probably a great book for you. I'd also recommend it to anyone who likes the work of Catherynne M. Valente; there are similarities in the stylized poetic-fantasy approach she takes, I think. Also recommended for people who are seeking fantasy books with non-headdesky representations of people of color, and anyone who particularly wants to support awesome independent small presses with awesome not-nearly-famous-enough lady authors.