Sofia Samatar

After his father's death, Jevick travels to Olondria, the distant land he has only read about in books and has longed to visit, and finds himself enchanted by the exotic land and haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl, Jissavet.

A Novel

A Stranger in Olondria

Prashanth Srivatsa

This book tore me. Sofia Samatar has dragged me into a world that brims with a love for the written word, to this quest for immortality through art and its preservation. Beautiful and heartbreaking.

Janice Hopper

I may have to think for a while about how to write about this book. But a few impressions:

The language. Ah, the language. Rich, lush, evocative. Allusive. Digressive. Stories within stories, poems within stories. It's lovely. But I found I had to take it in relatively small doses, so I wouldn't suffer from a surfeit of lovely language. 

The story IS about reading, and books, and telling stories, other people's stories as well as our own. It's arguably the best writing I've read in a long time. It's a little rich, so take your time with it.

Good stuff. For some reason, I kept being reminded of Clark Ashton Smith stories, but that's probably an artifact of my imagination, since I haven't read CAS since college.

Didi Chanoch

I am of two minds about this book. The prose here is second to none. Sofia Samatar is brilliant, and that absolutely shines through. It is absolutely beautifully written. I found the plot somewhat thin, and the characters difficult to latch on to. I found Lunre, the mentor to protagonist Jevick, fascinating, but he is left behind, and Jevick becomes increasingly frustrating (and frustrated, in turn) through much of the novel. 

I'm a plot and characters kind of reader, so in a sense, this book may not have been FOR me. And, indeed, it took me a long time to read it, leaving it and coming back. But there's a reason I kept coming back, and that's the simple fact that Sofia Samatar is very good at putting one word after another. And as this is a book about books, culture, and language, those skills are even more relevant than they would be for most novels. 

I didn't love A Stranger in Olondria, but I respected it a great deal, and when adding some of Samatar's wonderful short fiction and poetry which I was fortunate to read, I feel this - her first novel - is a sign of absolute greatness to come. I am keen to read the followup - set in the same beautifully imagined world, but otherwise unrelated - The Winged Histories, which was released earlier this year.

Taran Snodgress

DNF @ 33%

I realllllly wanted to like this book. After finding it on NPR's best science fiction and fantasy of the past decade list (https://www.npr.org/2021/08/18/102715...) I checked it out from my library. I just...couldn't get into it. I found the main character boring, and by 1/3 of the way through he hadn't made a decisions. All the events happened to him instead of him doing things. The prose was well written but over written at times. 

I also struggled with the formatting of the book. The spacing was very small and I had trouble reading in anything less than perfectly ideal conditions. My morning commute on the train is my reading time, and it was challenging to physically read

A Stranger in Olondria A Novel

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