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A review by porge_grewe
Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate
5.0
Brilliant novella about coming of age and the trials of teenage friendships against a backdrop of murder.
Saihate covers an impressive amount of ground in the late-teenage experience in such a short work, including the complexity of friendship, how we protect and use our friends, and the matching complexity of emotions surrounding friendship at that age (or, at all ages really, but which might be expressed most at that age), as well as the struggle of finding one's place in the world, the need to understand and to be understood, and the immediacy and impulsiveness of decision-making as you move from one thing to the next, not thinking of repercussions for yourself and those around you.
Saihate, and her translator, Kalau Almony, handle all this with simple, straightforward language which invites the reader into the narrative voice's frame of mind. Some of the strongest statements and images in the book come from its portrayals of obsession and possession in various forms from inside the viewpoint of its subject or object - In the sense of ownership of young women who perform and exploration of what that comes from, which emerges and re-emerges in various forms throughout the book, in obsession with a schoolmate who seems to have all the answers, and in the kind of hyper-focus which traumatic events can prompt in survivors.
In fact, in all these themes and in how they are accomplished, this book and Stephen Graham Jones' 'Night of the Mannequins' make excellent companion pieces - Each short, sharp, excellently-crafted books dealing with teenage relationships and responsibilities in the context of horrific acts.
Content warnings for
Saihate covers an impressive amount of ground in the late-teenage experience in such a short work, including the complexity of friendship, how we protect and use our friends, and the matching complexity of emotions surrounding friendship at that age (or, at all ages really, but which might be expressed most at that age), as well as the struggle of finding one's place in the world, the need to understand and to be understood, and the immediacy and impulsiveness of decision-making as you move from one thing to the next, not thinking of repercussions for yourself and those around you.
Saihate, and her translator, Kalau Almony, handle all this with simple, straightforward language which invites the reader into the narrative voice's frame of mind. Some of the strongest statements and images in the book come from its portrayals of obsession and possession in various forms from inside the viewpoint of its subject or object - In the sense of ownership of young women who perform and exploration of what that comes from, which emerges and re-emerges in various forms throughout the book, in obsession with a schoolmate who seems to have all the answers, and in the kind of hyper-focus which traumatic events can prompt in survivors.
In fact, in all these themes and in how they are accomplished, this book and Stephen Graham Jones' 'Night of the Mannequins' make excellent companion pieces - Each short, sharp, excellently-crafted books dealing with teenage relationships and responsibilities in the context of horrific acts.
Content warnings for