I have never been so delighted to be wrong in my life. In my First Chapter Thoughts, I posted that I wouldn’t make any guesses about the plot but that presumably Reid would head off to the university, etc.– And even that isn’t accurate. Goodness gracious. I love Premee Mohamed’s work SO MUCH.

Starting from the beginning. The Annual Migration of Clouds follows a girl called Reid in a post-apocalyptic settlement. She receives an acceptance to a university with a semi-mythical status, and I assumed from the first chapter that it would proceed from there to be a journey-type tale. Instead, it’s far more about community, duty, and being disabled in a subsistence-farming, survival environment. While trying to avoid spoilers, I will say that Mohamed’s grasp of the dynamics and mechanics of a post-apocalyptic future are so far beyond what I’ve ever seen in a book, and she does it in such a short form too! As suspected, Annual Migration is a novella, but it’s got two sequels, which I’ll be proceeding onto as soon as my library holds come in.

One of my favourite things about this book is how it embraces — not cynicism, no, quite the opposite — but a messiness and realism around human relationships. Reid and Henrik have a relationship that dances around quite being romantic, but isn’t a perfectly balanced friendship either — they’re just two people who have always been there for each other. Reid and her mother have a deeply fraught, complex, hard relationship underscored by their mutual disease. Yet Mohamed is significantly less interested in passing judgement and more in exploring the emotional fallout and consequences.

There’s so much more I could say about Annual Migration of Clouds, but I want to see how the trilogy plays out before I say much more! Meanwhile you can get the novella at any of your local bookstores, or like me, get it through Libby/Overdrive.

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