I was interested when I heard about the Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology crowdfunding campaign last year — African and African-diaspora creators building a shared universe featuring “an Africa-inspired secondary world with both humanoid and non-humanoid creatures living in a 5-planet, binary star system.” Sound technology and magic are the foundation of everything in this ‘verse, all the way back to the mother-goddess creation myth.
I was very busy then, though, and let the crowdfunding opportunity slip past, and haven’t read the anthology. I figured I’d get another chance to dip into that ‘verse later. Luckily, I was right. Even more luckily, I was given the opportunity to review a digital Advance Reader Copy of an upcoming novella in this setting, Songs for the Shadows, by Cheryl S. Ntumy.
I didn’t have any problem reading this novella without having read the earlier anthology, or a story that Interzone published, although I may have missed some nuances here. Ntumy did a fine job of supplying context that’s needed when it’s needed. I found the worldbuilding satisfyingly rich and intriguing, as I’d have expected from a shared universe with multiple creators, but also internally consistent, from what I could tell. That makes sense, given that Sauúti pitches must follow a story bible and pass muster with a collective of creators.
What I did find challenging was empathizing with the protagonist, although eventually I found myself at peace with her, as she found her own type of peace. The novella opened with Shad-Dari skipping out on a party she was throwing for her crew so that she could go bully a healer into flooding her body with a magical soundwave in order to silence her own internal echoes. This questionable “healing” was powered via shards that Shad-Dari had secretly abstracted from her own archaeological expedition.
So I was reading for the plot and the worldbuilding, not rooting for the protagonist. To be fair, I’ve never lost my home or a bunch of relatives in a tragedy, or been plagued by a sort of magical tinnitus that sounds like my dead family constantly whispering my name, and it turned out that Shad-Dari was working for an apparently exploitive corporation, not directly for real scholars, so maybe I didn’t have any right to judge her. However, she was still stealing from her heritage with only weak, self-serving justifications, so my sympathy as a reader was extremely limited at first.
What with this being a novella, it didn’t take too long for Shad-Dari to start facing consequences for her actions; at first completely bewildered and lost as to how to proceed, she kept trying various reactions, instead of just giving up, so I had to admire her persistence. Finally, she started facing up to her past and the reality of her situation, and embracing honesty within herself, and even looking beyond her own needs.
That might sound like a fairly typical redemption arc, but I’ve left out a lot of spoilery stuff about Shad-Dari’s interactions with other entities, plus her identity issues, plus temporal complications and more. For a novella, there’s a lot going on here.
I really enjoyed getting immersed into the Sauútiverse, learning a few things about how it works and how many elements of it are tied together, through following Shad-Dari’s literal and emotional journeys. She wasn’t always easy to identify with, but she was intense and interesting, and the revelations and transformations that she underwent felt rewarding in the end. I look forward to reading more stories in this setting, and more stories by Ntumy, here or in worlds all her own.
Songs for the Shadows: A Sauútiverse Novella, by Cheryl S. Ntumy, is due for publication on Nov. 12.
Content warnings: Addiction, mass casualties, death, trauma, family loss, crimes against archaeology.
Disclaimers: I have previously done paid proofreading work for the publisher, Atthis Arts, although I have not worked on this particular novella. I received a free eARC for review via NetGalley.
