Birth of the Anima by Kelsey K. Sather, finalist for the NIEA, is the first book in the Ancient Language of the Earth series. It tells the story of each Anima, their triumphs and failures, as they attempt to complete their task of bringing Order to a Disordered world. It is a book full of heavy themes such as ecocide, stewardship, consent, agency, sexism, and some of these themes are less subtle than others. There is a lot going on in this book, and I wish that it had either been longer or streamlined.
SPOILERS BELOW
I want to get a couple of the technical issues out of the way first. I admit, I came into this book with a fundamental misunderstanding of the style of story I was going to read. The middle third of Birth of the Anima are short stories that tell you about the other Animas. There are a lot of characters to keep track of and the stories are very circular. Anima is made, her role explained to her, she fights, she dies. I admit, I did not enjoy this section. I ended up skipping or skimming several of these chapters because they didn’t seem relevant to the story bookending them. These shorts are stories that I wished they had been placed in a separate anthology.
MOMENTS VERSUS SCENES
Nerdwriter does an excellent breakdown of what a moment is versus a scene in movies, and there is a great deal that a writer in any medium can take away from this. Birth of the Anima suffers from unearned moments. The most glaring of these moments for me was when the main protagonist, Freda, arrives in Haven. There is a sudden time skip to months down the road where she shares her first kiss with the woman she has desperately wanted for those long months. For the characters, there is weight in this moment. For the reader, there’s whiplash. I barely know Freda and I don’t know Tillie, so the moment loses its meaning and feeling. There are very few scenes where you as the reader get to breathe and learn to love the characters. These scenes are instead given to worldbuilding, to teaching you the importance of homesteading and caring for the planet we live on—lessons that are at the expense of the characters, instead of bringing you closer to them.
a study in consent
The overarching theme within this book is consent and respect, but it’s a theme that I wish had been explored in both the subtle and bold ways that it is expressed. The lack of consent and of agency, that many of the characters and Animas have showcases the necessity of the Anima. Yet in an excellent, rather insidious show of ends justifying the means, the Animas are usually thrust into the role with little to no choice. The last Anima seems to have stumbled into the role completely on accident, with no knowledge ahead of her as to what this journey truly entails.
Over all, I give Birth of the Anima 2/5 stars. I may not have been the perfect target audience, and I think there is enough to recommend this book if you enjoy YA books with LGBTQA* representation.
-L.J.
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