A well spun tale. I really liked the pacing and the writing. Well done feeling cohesive but also rooted in each time period, which can be hard in a book with so many different historical settings.
This book is especially cool when you realize it is based on a true artifact. This felt like a true version of Cloud Cuckoo Land
By a total coincidence I read this book while also starting on Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments. Both books seek to explore how critical fabulation can be employed to move beyond the archive, Hartman in the academic imagination and Brooks more so in the popular culture space. Both engage really elegantly in exploring hypothetical imaginings especially as it pertains to autonomy (or lack there of) and trauma. I like that for this book the act of imagining is seen first hand in the narrator as she engages with the archive.