Author: Premee Mohamed

#BookReview: The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The First Thousand Trees by Premee MohamedThe First Thousand Trees (The Annual Migration of Clouds, #3) by Premee Mohamed
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Annual Migration of Clouds #3
Pages: 156
Published by ECW Press on September 30, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Henryk Mandrusiak, finding nothing left for him in his community following his best friend Reid's departure, travels through the devastated land in search of a new place to call home.
"One of the most unique and engaging voices in genre fiction." -- Booklist
"In this rich and nuanced universe, Mohamed offers an emotionally fierce and human story that takes the time and space to personalize apocalypse." -- Quill & Quire, starred review
After making a grievous mistake that ended in death, Henryk Mandrusiak feels increasingly ostracized within his own community, and after the passing on of his parents and the departure of his best friend, Reid, there is little left to tie him to the place he calls home. Henryk does something he never expected: he sets out into the harsh wilds alone, in search of far-flung family. He finds his uncle's village, but making a life for himself in this unfriendly new place -- rougher and more impoverished than the campus where he grew up -- isn't easy. Henryk strives to carve out a place of his own but learns that some corners of his broken world are darker than he could have imagined.
This stunning novella concludes the story Mohamed started in The Annual Migration of Clouds and continued in We Speak Through the Mountain, bleaker than ever but still in search of a spark of hope in the climate apocalypse.

My Review:

The Annual Migration of Clouds series has been an exploration of what happens after “the end of the world as they know it”, which is a very different thing from the actual end of the world. The world is ticking along just fine in this post-climate-apocalypse dystopia, but the humans who caused it all – not so much.

The idea behind this series, and what makes it so compelling and so heartbreaking, is that the world didn’t end all at once. Which it probably won’t in a climate change run amuck scenario. Instead, it’s a long, slow slide of things slipping away, as the infrastructure that supports a high-tech, 21st century (or later) lifestyle erodes piece by piece as roads wash out and coastlines shrink and satellites fall because what we need is beyond any one person’s or even one town’s knowledge and ability to fix.

In the first book, the titular Annual Migration of Clouds, we were able to experience one possible scenario, as we follow Reid and Henryk in a village named ‘campus’ – probably because it used to be one.

Their village is a bit of a liberal, quasi-socialist experiment, not surprising if it truly did descend from a college campus. Everyone who can works, but those who can’t are supported. Everyone has a job to do – and it’s each according to their ability. They keep each other afloat and keep the place protected. It’s a bit utopian, or it would be if they weren’t living at a time when everything they need to keep alive is scarce while an endemic disease ravages the population.

In the second book, We Speak Through the Mountain, we view this world from an entirely different place, as Reid has been invited to the elite, exclusive, enclave of Howse University. H.U. was once a gated retreat for the wealthy and influential, a place where they planned to sit out the apocalypse and only return when it was safe and they could rule over ‘the masses’ they consigned to the fate they escaped.

H.U. invites very few into its rarefied location – just enough to maintain the genetic diversity of their population. And it operates under a kind of benign brainwashing in the way that it makes life so safe and comfortable inside that no one will ever want to leave. Reid asks too many questions about what the ‘haves’ owe the ‘have nots’, and pokes gigantic holes in H.U.’s self-defining narratives about the laziness and barbaric conditions among the villages just like the one she came from, blaming her people for their inability to recover from the apocalypse even as H.U. withholds the technology that might help.

This final book in the trilogy takes a completely different tack and follows, not Reid, but her best friend Henryk. Reid is smart and capable and confident, while Henryk is anything but on all counts. Reid was always the leader, and Henryk was always someone’s hapless follower. Which is how he ended up leaving campus in Reid’s wake, heading for a not-so-nearby village where his uncle lives in the hope of a fresh start.

That’s where Henryk discovers that there were other, terrible, ways that this post-apocalyptic scenario could go. He finds himself in a village run by a tyrant, pushed and pulled from one abusive situation to another, despised for not knowing how things are done and then not being able to do them, and ends up facing death at the hands of raiders who use him to destroy the place he wants to protect even if he’s not very good at it.

All of which leads back to the beginning, as both Reid and Henryk return to campus. While it’s true that there’s no place like home, there’s also nowhere that manages to survive one day after another other any better than the place they grew up in. And there, at least, they have each other as best friends and quasi-siblings – and after both of their journeys, that’s enough.

Escape Rating B: Taken as a whole, now that this series is whole, I still liked the first book best, although the second book was better on my second read because by then I had listened to the first one and the set up made a whole lot more sense. That’s a hint to read/listen to this series in order.

I didn’t like this one as much because a) I didn’t like following Henryk nearly as much as I did Reid, and b) Henryk is one of those characters to whom horrible things just seem to happen, to the point where it’s no surprise that he ends up in yet one terrible situation after another. So I did feel for him but he also drove me nuts.

The different responses to the climate apocalypse read like situations I’ve seen before in this kind of story – just not all together in the same story. But it makes sense that with the breakdown of communication, places that aren’t all that far apart would find their own way to keep going – whether good or bad – based on how and where they started.

Campus feels very utopian, especially in comparison to the other two options. They are doing their damndest to do their best for everyone – even when they don’t have enough to make things good for anyone. It’s the way we wish things would turn out – but we humans are not even capable of that level of fairness now when there actually IS enough if we would just share it. This situation reminds me a bit of the near-future timeline in Khan Wong’s Down in the Sea with Angels – and it’s working just about as well because humans are gonna human in the best and worst of scenarios.

Reid’s foray into Howse University smacks of the situation in the Enclave in Anna Hackett’s Hell Squad series, where a group of the rich and powerful created a sanctuary for themselves so they could safely sit out an alien invasion.

The hellscape that Henryk finds himself in is the ‘red in tooth and claw’ version of humanity that we sort of expect to see in a dystopia. OTOH the folks of Sprucedown started out with a good location and a good plan for survival – which is where the Thousand Trees of the title come in. And very much on the other, they’ve come under the sway of a late-arriving dictator who is more interested in power and personal aggrandizement than in managing the resources that make it all possible. In the end, everyone pays for his hubris. For anyone who has ever read even a part of S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse, particularly the early books like Dies the Fire, this scenario is all too familiar in its hellishness.

In the end, now that we’ve reached an end, this series is three views of an apocalypse, it’s what happens AFTER the end of the world as they know it, and it’s compelling and heartbreaking and sad and scary. Because it might all come true.

A- #AudioBookReview: By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> novelette review> podcasts> Short Story Review
A- #AudioBookReview: By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars by Premee Mohamed"By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars" by Premee Mohamed in Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2024 by Premee Mohamed
Narrator: Kat Kourbeti
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: fantasy, short stories
Series: Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2024
Pages: 24
Length: 1 hour
Published by Strange Horizons on April 21, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website
Goodreads

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Kat Kourbeti reads Premee Mohamed's Hugo Finalist Novelette 'By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars'.

My Review:

As much as I enjoy audiobooks, I don’t listen much to podcasts. Howsomever, last year when I finally realized that a lot of the shorter works nominated for the Hugo Awards were available as podcasts, the penny dropped and I dove in.

Last year, I opened my Hugo reviewing with a short work by one of my favorite authors, and this year continues that trend, albeit with a different author. So here we are with one of the Best Novelette (7,500-17,500 words) nominees, “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed, originally published in Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2024.

Strange Horizons as a whole is also nominated for Best Semiprozine, and Premee Mohamed also has a Best Novella nomination for The Butcher of the Forest. Which I read, and liked at the time, but it’s grown on me over the intervening months as I read stories that were similar but not nearly as good and ended up referring to it surprisingly often.

This story reads like a fantasy, although there’s a possibility that the wider world we don’t see is post-apocalyptic. But consider it a fantasy because that’s what we have in front of us, even if the reasons for the world being the way it is might be elsewise.

At first, the story seems to follow a typical pattern, that of the master and their apprentice. Which is never a bad trope for a fantasy to follow, as it allows for more than a few shortcuts to keep the word count down to fit into a shorter work and still come to a satisfying conclusion.

But that’s not the road this one takes, and it’s all the more fascinating for it. Because the ‘Great Wizard Firion’ that the village of Weystone relies on, well, isn’t. Isn’t great. Isn’t all that sure she’s even still a wizard.

The magical spark of Firion’s power is gone – and she can’t figure out how to get it back, although she’s certainly tried. And exhausted herself in trying.

But she still has all her knowledge – even if her possession of wisdom might be debatable under the circumstances. So when the university sends her an apprentice she hasn’t asked for or even looked for, Firion concocts a desperate plan to keep her secret – along with her credentials – from both the university AND her new apprentice.

Because she needs him to solve her other big problem. There’s an enormous sea dragon out in the lake who invades the shore – and the nearby village – once every eight to twelve years. All the signs are present that this year will be one of THOSE years. The Bouldus is coming. And Firion needs her unlooked for apprentice to do all the heavy lifting in keeping the dreaded sea dragon away from the people that she’s supposed to protect.

All she has to do is live up to that old saying that Firion is feeling with every breath she takes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, TEACH.”

Escape Rating A-: Short works often end up at A- for me, even at their best, because there’s never quite enough and I always wish there were more. Which is certainly true in this case, as I’d really like to know both what this world is like outside Weystone, what Firion did to herself to cause her magic to burn out – and what brought Apprentice Cane to her door – or to the door of the University at all.

Actually, I’m pretty sure that Firion would like to know that last bit too, but the whole point of this story is that they work together on keeping each other’s secrets along with a message about being able to rise to the occasion, no matter how desperate or dire, with the right teacher, the right teaching, and the right encouragement.

We don’t get enough of Cane to know what he came from, but we do get plenty of hints. This could have been his coming of age story, but that would have been a more typical story. I think I enjoyed it a lot more because the story was told through Firion’s eyes, so we get her wry observations, her feelings of impostor syndrome, her sense of her powers and abilities fading away and her desperation to hold on, and last but not least her sense of duty both to her apprentice and to the village that believes in her so much that she has to come through for them even if she can’t do it with her own two hands. She still has to get it done.

That she trains her apprentice by making up numbered rules for him to follow whenever she’s at a loss for words or instructions or simply wants him to stop interrupting and pay attention was a nice little homage to a character that I never expected to see invoked in fantasy – but fit in perfectly in this particular instance.

This turned out to be a terrific start to this year’s Hugo readings, and the reading by Kat Kourbeti certainly helped! I’m happy to say that I’ll be back with another short work in a couple of weeks – or whenever the mood strikes next.

#BookReview: One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
#BookReview: One Message Remains by Premee MohamedOne Message Remains by Premee Mohamed
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, horror, short stories
Pages: 188
Published by Psychopomp on February 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Pageantry, pomp, pretense, and peril—"The General's Turn,” originally published in The Deadlands, drew readers into the dark world of a ceremony where Death herself might choose to join the audience... or step onto the stage.
Award-winning author Premee Mohamed presents three brand new stories set in this morally ambiguous world of war and magic. In “One Message Remains,” Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them—and they have chosen their weapons well.
In “The Weight of What is Hollow,” Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor.
Finally, in “Forsaking All Others,” ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother's village, he is joined by a fellow deserter—and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself.
“Premee Mohamed is one of Canada's most exciting thinkers and writers of speculative fiction. Her stories bravely go where few dare to, each employing a deftness of language and surety of form that offers a fresh experience each time. One Message Remains and the stories within are no exception, each tale different from the other, yet all very much quintessential Premee stories. Readers of her works, long and short both, will find much to love here.” — Suyi Davies Okungbowa, author of Son of the Storm and Lost Ark Dreaming

My Review:

I picked up this collection because I found several of the author’s previous works compelling, particularly The Annual Migration of Clouds, We Speak Through the Mountain, and especially The Butcher of the Forest. (I keep finding more and more books that remind me of Butcher, including yesterday’s book!)

It might look like all of the above are novellas – only because they are. The stories in this collection are as well – or toe up to that line from the novelette side. In other words, none of these are terribly long – and they don’t need to be.

Together, they make a fractured whole. Fractured because they are loosely centered around a fractured place, the conquered province of East Seudast by the conquering country of Treotan. The individual stories, three of which are new for this collection, revolve around the states of conquering and being conquered. Of what it means to see every country in the world as ‘lesser’ and ‘barbaric’ and ‘incapable of using their resources properly’, as though that gives another country the right to roll right over them.

And all of those are mere excuses for overweening cupidity and above all, hubris.

On the other side, there’s the cost of all of that rapaciousness. That seeing everyone and everything else on the face of the map as beneath their notice means that the conquerors learn nothing about those they conquer, learn nothing about the land, and learn nothing about the beliefs that bind those who resist.

Not even the dead.

“One Message Remains”
Major Lyell Tzajos believes that he has been assigned an important duty by the Treotan military, a task that will result in promotions all around once he – and the team whose names he can’t even manage to remember – completes their task. A task which Tzajos considers a humanitarian mission towards the people of their newly conquered province.

But Tzajos is a small man in a job that is still much too big for him, assigned to this command because, on paper at least, it suits his punctilious, meticulous, duty-bound, bean-counting nature down to the literal ground. Which is, in fact, the literal bedrock of the duty. Digging up the graves of the enemy, identifying each and every one of their bodies, and repatriating those bodies and their effects to families who must still be looking for closure in regards to the fate of their family members.

Of course, the Treotans didn’t ask the Dastians what they thought about this mission, because from their perspective, including Tzajos’ obedient, practically slavish devotion to the standards of his homeland, the Dastians are ‘barbarians’ and their beliefs about corpses and spirits and Death are unscientific and illogical.

Even though, as it turns out, those beliefs are entirely true.

There is a LOT to unpack in this story, so it is fitting that it is the longest one in the collection. We’re inside Tzajos’ head – and the man is a hot mess from the beginning. He is truly a small man, trying to pretend that he is bigger, failing, knowing that he’s failing, and still not seeing the ways in which he is. He IS, after all, trying to do his best. It’s just that his beliefs about what constitutes best are so deeply ingrained in his own culture that he is WAY off course. He’s not actually evil, he’s just so brainwashed that he can’t see that what his country is doing IS evil. He starts out lost and gets even more so and doesn’t take any control of anything at all until his end, and even then he only gets glimmers of understanding. That I could easily map Tzajos onto any overworked, underqualified functionary in any rapacious empire, fictional or historical, made this story even more compelling and more thought provoking than the premise hinted at. Escape Rating A

“The Weight of What Is Hollow”
This is the story that should have been the creepiest – and it is – but not in any of the ways that one might think going into it. Because it’s not really about the truly creepy idea of building a gallows out of human bones for the purpose of hanging a criminal which will provide more human bones. Because the bones may be the creep but they’re not the point.

The point is about creepy humans with power, and quiet resistance to that power. The local Treotan commander thinks he can overpower a female apprentice boneworker through might, intimidation and threats. Her family is afraid, and begs her to submit – because they fear for their own necks and they are right to do so. So she appears to step on the path the commander wants, knowing the end. But she only appears to, and appearance as it turns out, is everything.

I liked this a lot. OTOH, at its heart the story could fit into pretty much any fantasy world, and I adored the way that Taya subverted the narrative that was planned for her. Very much on the other hand, the details of their traditions added depth to the worldbuilding and pulled me in hard and well and truly. I also enjoyed the way that this story was about the war without being buried neck deep in the war. It’s a much subtler way of fighting back that was needed in this collection. Taya’s the one character in all of the stories that I would LOVE to see more of. Escape Rating A+

“Forsaking All Others”
This one didn’t quite stick for me. I was into it while I was reading it, but it didn’t catch at my memory the same way that the other three stories did in their different ways. At first, it’s a story about two deserters trying to find a place to lay low where the Treotans won’t find them. But then the story changes into something that’s more about the traditions and beliefs of the conquered land – and that they are still alive and well and may have deadly consequences for anyone who believes that they’ve won. Escape Rating B

“The General’s Turn”
This is the one story in this collection that has been previously published, in this particular case in The Deadlands, Issue 3, July 2021 as well as The Long List Anthology Volume 8: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List because this story was on the long list for the Hugos in 2022. It’s also the one story in this collection that leaned the furthest into horror AND the one story out of the four that didn’t work for me, although not because of the horror.

The story here feels like it’s about exploring the rot at the heart of the Treotan ‘empire’. On the one hand, it’s VERY creepy, all about an elaborate murder machine operated by a bunch of supposed elites who claim to be carrying out a grand, old, ritual but are really just there for the humiliation of the chosen victim and the inevitable carnage as that victim is toyed with and then literally ground into a bloody pulp.

We’re in the head of the ‘general’ controlling this whole affair, someone who believes in the spirit of what this ceremony used to be, and who is tired – possibly unto death – of all the inevitabilities baked into it. In a fit of ennui – he decides to change the script. It’s not mercy, it’s not enlightenment, it’s just another and different way of turning the screws.

It’s probably intended as a play on the idea that the ‘empire’ is really a gigantic clockworks that is intended to grind everyone, friends and enemies alike, under the wheels of its so-called ‘progress’ and ‘efficiency’. I may have needed to message to be a bit more explicit if that is the case. Escape Rating C

Overall Escape Rating B

#BookReview: We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee MohamedWe Speak Through the Mountain (Annual Migration of Clouds, #2) by Premee Mohamed
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: climate fiction, dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Annual Migration of Clouds #2
Pages: 152
Published by ECW Press on June 18, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The enlivening follow-up to the award-winning sensation The Annual Migration of Clouds Traveling alone through the climate-crisis-ravaged wilds of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, 19-year-old Reid Graham battles the elements and her lifelong chronic illness to reach the utopia of Howse University. But life in one of the storied “domes” ― the last remnants of pre-collapse society ― isn’t what she expected. Reid tries to excel in her classes and make connections with other students, but still grapples with guilt over what happened just before she left her community. And as she learns more about life at Howse, she begins to realize she can’t stand idly by as the people of the dome purposely withhold needed resources from the rest of humanity. When the worst of news comes from back home, Reid must make a choice between herself, her family, and the broken new world. In this powerful follow-up to her award-winning novella The Annual Migration of Clouds , Premee Mohamed is at the top of her game as she explores the conflicts and complexities of this post-apocalyptic society and asks whether humanity is doomed to forever recreate its worst mistakes.

My Review:

The world that Reid Graham battles her way through is a dystopia that seems to have suffered through a long slide rather than an actual apocalypse. There’s not really a day or an event that people point to, more like a slow collapse that is still ongoing.

Actually kind of like now, if you squint. Which feels intentional if not exactly in your face. Although it certainly is in Reid’s face as she makes her way from her dying home village to the secret location of the rarefied elite enclave, Howse University.

Reid intends to use the four years of her scholarship to learn everything she can so she can bring that knowledge back home where it’s needed. The powers-that-be at H.U. have other plans. Plans that become obvious to Reid long before the equally obvious brainwashing is able to kick in.

If it ever can or ever will.

Howse University is kind of an Eden, but the parable is a bit reversed. It’s not so much about eating from the tree of knowledge as it is her unwillingness to let go of the knowledge she came in with.

She knows, from bitter experience, that the terrible situation back in her home wasn’t because her people were lazy, or because they didn’t try to make things better, or because they were stupid or any of the other things that elites say to blame poverty and disease on the people suffering them instead of on the systems that keep them down.

Reid’s people are in the position they are in because the diseases brought by the creeping climate apocalypse keep sapping their strength and energy and pulling them down by force. Her people are too caught up in caring for the sick and burying the dead and keeping everyone fed and barely housed to have the time to work on recapturing the tech and the knowledge they used to have.

Knowledge and tech that Howse University and its network of other institutional enclaves are keeping to themselves, for themselves, as they look down upon the have-nots their own ancestors created.

So Reid reminds the H.U. students and faculty of all the truths they’d rather forget, hoping to dig deep enough to find a conscience in a few of them. Even as the classes and the restrictions and the safety protocols and the many, many, health enhancements that H.U. administers keep the deadly, debilitating disease she brought up the mountain with her at bay.

But never cure – because they want her to be dependent and easily influenced, and that’s what the disease does for them. A truth which condemns Reid and sets her free, all at the same time.

Escape Rating B+: I had not read The Annual Migration of Clouds before I picked up We Speak Through the Mountain, and I’m not sure that was such a good idea – so I’ve rectified that omission in the months since, because now that I’ve read that first book, I can tell that I would have rated this one higher when I read it if I’d had more of the background.

Consider this a warning not to make the same mistake. Both stories are novellas, so neither is a long read, but I think they work better together rather than separately. Not that I didn’t get enough to find my way in this book, but I think they work a whole lot better as a whole.

This second book has strong hints of The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, another novella that pokes hard at the stratification and ossification of society, and the way that academia reinforces such tendencies no matter how liberal it likes to think it is.

As I said, this is a bit of an Eden parable in that Howse University is paradise and she is thrown out both because she has eaten from the tree of knowledge within H.U. and because she came in having already eaten from that tree – at least a different branch of it -and refusing to stop.

Reid tries her best but the entrenched privilege is too real, and the brainwashing of each class of recruits has been too successful. Which doesn’t erase the questions asked but not answered throughout the story.

What do the descendants of the haves – who continue to have and to exclude – owe the descendants of the have-nots? If the author returns to this world, and I hope she does, I’ll be very interested to see how things proceed from here, because it feels like Reid’s journey is not over. Now that I’m invested I want to see what happens next – and what Howse University decides to do about it.

A- #AudioBookReview: The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee MohamedThe Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
Narrator: Eva Tavares
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Annual Migration of Clouds #1
Pages: 158
Length: 4 hours and 49 minutes
Published by ECW Press on September 28, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In post-climate disaster Alberta, a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community.
The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away - to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society - but she can't bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her.
When she's offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can't even trust her own mind?

My Review:

There’s a deep, dark chasm between “the end of the world as they know it” and “the end of the world”. It’s a badly carved gorge where the steps going down are slippery, steep and riddled with stretches that have been completely washed out and strewn with sharp rocks and trail-obstructing boulders. The steps going up the other side are much too far away to see – and might not even exist at all.

In movies – one of the many, many things from the “Before Times” that no longer exist in Reid’s broken world – and books – of which there are some but not nearly enough – the end of the world is a catastrophic EVENT, a thing that happens or more likely that the brave heroes of the fictional narrative manage to stave off by luck, by ingenuity, by miracle, or all of the above.

But that’s not what happened in the world that Reid lives in. There was no singular event, no one, overwhelming catastrophe, no nuclear or meteor strike. Just a long, slow slide down the side of that chasm, as birth rates fell and climate change got more extreme and power sources dried up or died out or became too remote to access as the world fell back into its constituent parts.

Reid lives in a world of scarcity, in a ‘city’ that barely hangs on from year to year and from disaster to disaster, as a parasitic ‘disease’ ravages her body and her mind and increases its hold on the dwindling population year by year.

But there’s a light at the end of Reid’s dark tunnel – a light that’s just for her. A few places, former enclaves of the rich from back in the day when money still mattered – closed the gates of their domes, their pockets of science and tech and ‘civilization’ from the ‘Before Times” and kept the barbarians and the diseases and the wildlife OUT of their pristine sanctuaries.

One of those enclaves is Howse University. Every year, Howse sends out invitations to a privileged few graduating students in the remote cities to come to Howse and enter the next class. To enter a world where electricity still functions, where books are still printed and not merely preserved, where science still happens and knowledge is passed from teacher to students in the lap of safe, well-fed, climate controlled luxury.

A place where Reid might be able to find a cure for the disease that is taking over both her mother’s body and mind – and her own.

All Reid has to do is reach the assigned meeting place in the limited time available. All she has to do is get her mother to forgive her for leaving, for possibly turning her back on everything and everyone Reid has known and loved, on the people and the place and the community that has sheltered her for her entire life.

Traveling all alone through an unknown wilderness is going to be much, much easier than getting her mother – and the parasite that lives within her – to accept that their daughter is leaving them behind.

Escape Rating A-: I picked up this book because I read the sequel to this, We Speak Through the Mountain first and it felt like half a story. A very good half, but still a half and reading the second half without the first I felt like I was missing something. Which, as it turned out, I was. Not enough to prevent me from liking the other book, but enough to keep me from getting as invested in Reid’s journey as I did this time around – although I do feel that investment in the second book now in retrospect.

In other words, don’t do what I did. If the premise of this book or We Speak Through the Mountain speaks to you, read The Annual Migration of Clouds first. They’re both novellas, so even together they are not a big read, but they are a deep one, and deeper when read together in the proper order.

I listened to most of this book, but had to finish in the ebook because as the story got closer and closer to its ending I felt compelled to discover how Reid managed to get to where we first met her in We Speak Through the Mountain – particular the disaster that her brain kept shying away from during that story.

However, the narrator for The Annual Migration of Clouds was excellent and did a terrific job of portraying Reid’s oh-so-real combination of angst and anger as she works her way through her present situation, the history she’s forced to inherit, the unfairness of the world to which she was born, her love for her mother and her community and her NEED to discover as much as she can of what’s been denied her. Even as her internal voice rants and rails at the parasite that influences her thoughts and controls her behavior to a degree that she only becomes conscious of when she fights it. Because it punishes her when she does.

The Annual Migration of Clouds is a coming-of-age story AND it’s a story about the survivors of the end of the world, making their way down that slippery slope of retreating technology and regressive knowledge, just trying to get through another day and another year in the hopes that someday it will all be better for someone – even though they all know that better day will not come for them.

If this part of the story, this description and setup of a world in decline in a way that is in no way the fault of anyone or anything mired in it grabs your imagination, if the way that Reid’s community has managed to survive, along with the many ways in which they demonstrate, as best they can, that survival is insufficient, reads as fascinating and entirely too plausible – as it did to this reader – there are other stories that take this same concept and follow it in different directions – or are nearer to or farther down the road from that initial slide – such as Lark Ascending by Silas House, The Starless Crown by James Rollins, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel may also appeal – and vice versa as well.

Reid’s experiences at Howse University, as related in We Speak Through the Mountain, ask a different set of questions, questions about what the haves owe to the have nots, and what happens when an outsider, repeatedly and often, challenges the smug elitism of their safe, secure, patronizing privilege. Now that I know how Reid came to those experiences, I may go back and experience them again for myself to see how much that story has changed now that I have more of this one.

#BookReview: The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Butcher of the Forest by Premee MohamedThe Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, horror
Pages: 160
Published by Tordotcom on February 27, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.
At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.
No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.
So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.

My Review:

There’s no actual butcher in this forest, but it doesn’t need one. The forest is enough of a butcher all on its own. And the thing it’s already butchered, more than anything or anyone else, is Veris Thorn’s heart.

But that’s not where we start this story. We start the story in a place that seems all too typical of epic fantasy of the myth telling and retelling school. Because there’s a forest surrounding Veris’ village. A forest that none of the locals ever enter, day or night, because people who go into the forest do not come out again. Ever.

Except for Veris. Once upon a time, she went in after a child. And brought both herself and the child out again. Not safely, not easily, and ultimately not anything remotely like a happy ending. But still, once upon that time, Veris went in and came back out again.

The Tyrant who seems to have swallowed so much of Veris’ world, has Veris’ dragged out of her bed at dawn and brought before him still in her nightclothes. She doesn’t know why, she doesn’t know what she could have possibly done. All she knows is that she has no choice.

Because the Tyrant will kill her remaining family and burn the village they live in to the ground if she does not obey whatever he will demand of her. It’s who he is, it’s what he does, and it’s how he’s conquered the world.

But the Tyrant is also a father. A father whose children have gone missing into that terrible forest, because they are just at that age when children think they are more grownup than they are and want adventures more than they want to obey. Even to obey a terrifying Tyrant like their father.

It’s up to Veris, a middle-aged woman with one singular experience of surviving the forest, a few tools and bits of old and cobbled-together legends, and a desperate desire to save her family and her village from being burnt to a crisp to enter the forest one more time. And to come back out again with two children, safe and sound. Before a nightfall that she won’t even be able to see from inside the dense woods.

It’s an impossible quest, but it’s the only hope she has for her people. But to the Forest she’s the one that got away – and it will only let her back in this time so it can keep her – or something else she holds dear.

Escape Rating B: At first, the forest sounded a LOT like the forests in Middle Earth where some of the trees’ hearts have turned dark. The way that Veris describes the forest near her village is very like Merry’s descriptions of The Old Forest around the Shire.

So I was prepared for that kind of quest – which wasn’t at all what I got. Which is generally a good thing.

I was also confused because there is no ‘Butcher’ IN the forest, and it’s dubious whether any of the characters, at least so far, are the ‘Butcher’ OF the forest. Not that the Tyrant doesn’t butcher everything in his rapacious path, and won’t make an attempt at butchering the entire forest if it doesn’t give him back his children. Or at least his heir.

After all, situations like this one are just what the ‘spare’ is born for.

But the story isn’t quite any of the things I was expecting. In spite of – or perhaps because of the Tyrant’s oppression at the beginning and it’s promise overshadowing the whole journey every time Veris stumbles.

As much as all the admonitions about not eating or drinking in the Forest and not bargaining with the fey creatures who dwell there, this story is about a journey and not a destination. It’s a journey into, not the dark heart of the forest or even the dark heart of the Tyrant although both certainly exist. It’s about Veris’ journey to her own dark heart, with the two children as both goad and conscience, reminding her of her own deepest losses while forcing her to recognize that they are not responsible for the sins of their own father against hers, and are much too young to have yet committed sins of their own.

A lesson that is every bit as hard for Veris to bear as all the other lessons that the Forest intends to teach her – whether she wants to learn those lessons or not.

What kept niggling at me through my read of The Butcher of the Forest was that it reminded me, strongly and often, of something else that was not Middle Earth. And that, as it turns out, is the Sooz duology in Peter S. Beagle’s The Way Home, set in the world of The Last Unicorn.

But Veris is not Sooz. Veris is Molly Grue in the first book in Sooz’ story. Molly Grue is the mentor character who rescues Sooz on Sooz’ first quest and trains her to take her second quest alone. A quest very much like the one that young Eleanor is barely on the threshold of when The Butcher of the Forest shudders to a heartbreaking halt.

Because once upon a time, the Forest kept Veris’ only child – and Veris went into the Forest to get her back. Now, the Forest has held onto Eleanor’s only brother, and she is determined to repeat Veris’ journey. Whether she will also repeat Veris’ mistakes along the way is a tale that is hopefully yet to be told.