This is my third Mohamed book and as such, I’ve learned that I can trust her work — so I’m diving into The Annual Migration of Clouds without so much as a cursory look at the blurb. It’s a fun way to experience books, if occasionally risky. It’s also been a while since I’ve done one of these and I figured, why wait?
Already in one chapter, the premise has its needle-sharp hooks in me. We’ve got our main character Reid with a mysterious illness – a symbiont, or parasite, known only as “cad” — in a post-ecological collapse setting. With a letter from a mysterious university, her world has just opened up – she’s been summoned to study, and has to get there on her own. What is this university? It’s a place of study, but it’s also a place of hope. Something as simple as paper is imbued with massive significance — Reid’s community uses grey recycled paper and root dye ink, whereas the university has specially engineered self-healing, self-lit paper. It’s fascinating worldbuilding, focused on necessities we don’t even think about today.
The other thing standing out to me already from Chapter One is a comparison to Siege of Burning Grass. Siege won my love by, among other things, having a physically disabled, deformed* character navigating what was already an interesting and thrilling set-up on its own. Alefret’s disability and physical difference are absolutely, inescapably part of the story; but it isn’t a story about being disabled. As a result, I’m extremely excited to open a book to a character with a genetic, incurable progressive/degenerative disease — and yet with a plot hook that isn’t immediately related. (Possibly even more excited; while Alefret was a favourite, I’m someone with a progressive disability myself and will be reading with quite a lot of interest.) I will balance that out with an acknowledgement that a book that isn’t (to my knowledge!) an own voices work always comes with some risks — but also, disability is one of those things where so many of us have some experience with it, and so many of us within the community are just as bad about perpetuating harmful beliefs, that the tag means increasingly little. (Also, maybe it was marketed that way and I just didn’t pay attention. It’s not like they put that stuff in the blurbs. I dunno.)
One thing I do try not to do with these is try to predict where the plot will go. I have some thoughts already, of course — Reid will make her way to the university, most likely, and face all sorts of trials — but at the same time, there are so many possible ways for it to go from here. The tone has been set, but with that tone comes the acknowledgement that the darker a book, the less likely it is to play by tropes. And I like it that way.
Ready to report back when I finish! Time to get to the rest of it. Cheers!
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Elliott Dunstan 