Set in a future where the galaxy is dominated by a massive colonialist corporation called Umbai, this complex space opera novel centers on Nia Imani, the captain of a commercial freighter. Nia is an emotionally guarded woman who has trouble making and keeping connections, but when she meets a mysterious boy whose escape pod crashed on a farming colony planet, she finds herself drawn to him. But he also captures the attention of a powerful figure in Umbai who believes the boy may unknowingly hold the secret to instant teleportation without relativistic effects, which could revolutionize space travel and further consolidate corporate control.

Time distortion is a theme running through every level of the book—literal, figurative, structural. Relativistic time dilation heightens social disconnectedness, as a space traveler who leaves a planet for mere months of their own time will find friends are decades older when they return. A person may live for hundreds of years and remember ancient ways now lost, yet find the spectre of their past mistakes still painfully present. The book's narrative style reflects this warping of time's fabric, lingering in detail over certain moments but at other times fast-forwarding through years in a paragraph. All this underpins the exploration of connection and loss, as well as questions of how many times you can start over, what you bring with you, and what you leave behind.

I found the first third or so of the book to be the strongest. Like Jimenez's second book The Spear Cuts Through Water, it paints a clear picture of the universe as made up of diverse and interconnected lives, where the camera could turn and follow anyone and find a story just as rich as the main protagonists'. I also appreciated the deeply anticapitalist and anticolonialist themes, which reminded me of Ann Leckie in the way the human costs of imperialism are built into the story.

The book is extremely ambitious for a first novel, and in the end I think it reaches a little beyond its grasp. After a while the epic scope, large cast, and unconventional pacing began to make me feel that some aspects were rushed and underexplained. Sometimes we don't see a character for a long time, and by the time we rejoined them I'd lost the thread of what they were doing and why. There are also some characters whose motivations are never revealed and some plot questions that are never answered, which made the last section feel like a shaky landing. When I noticed there were only thirty pages to go I was like, "How the hell is he going to wrap all this up?" and the answer is he kind of didn't.

I found The Spear Cuts Through Water more fully realized and satisfying, but he wrote that after this, so if trends continue I'd say he's on the right track. I'll keep an eye out for what he does next.

(Content notes include child abuse, torture, climate change apocalypse, and the fact that the title is literal—the worldbuilding involves the extinction of all Earth's birds. 😭)