This is an alluring book about moss. True to its title, Gathering Moss, this time Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to walk in nature and gather the lustrous green carpet of mosses—plants that nature gifts to humans with their divergent shapes and purposes.

This book has remarkably made me reminisce about experiments I conducted during my college years nearly a decade ago—extracting genomic DNA from liverwort tissue. This book feels so nostalgic for me.

Gathering Moss contains scientific information about moss mixed with the author's experiences as a proficient bryologist. But reading this book didn't feel like reading a textbook, it was more of an enlightening and thoughtful read.

The more you turned the pages of Gathering Moss, the more you're amazed by how beautiful their variety is, and the more you realized how wonderful this creature that land provided for humans is, it also led you to respect their existence through the reciprocity they showed to others' lives.

I hold tight to the vision that someday soon we will find the courage of self-restraint, the humility to live like mosses. On that day, when we rise to give thanks to the forest, we may hear the echo in return, the forest giving thanks to the people.

P.S: Say hi to my most fav moss species, Schistostega pennata.

Overview: The Familiar is a beautifully realized historical fantasy about a Jewish girl finding her power amidst the treacherous fanaticism of Catholic Spain. Leigh Bardugo weaves a tale that is at once familiar and fantastical, a fable which is as spellbinding as it is heartfelt. The writing seems to work a subtle enchantment over the reader, drawing one into the music and rhythm of a past which still echoes in the present, and the hopes and dreams for a future of one’s own making.

What to expect: This is not a typical fantasy novel, nor does it try to be one, so I think some of the complaints I’ve seen online about this book can simply be chalked up to a misalignment in expectations vs reality. It’s more of a historical fiction novel with fantasy elements, and the way the magical elements are treated almost kind of remind me of the classic magic realism I read for Latin American literature classes. Character and plot are inextricable, and the close focus on character means that the reader does not get to see too much outside of that character’s field of view. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when most fantasy novels are wider and a bit more expansive in scope, it can feel jarring for long-time fantasy readers who jump into this book blind.

That all being said, I feel like I do need to mention that the plot is pretty lackluster. An intense focus on character development and the emotions and minutiae of their daily life is not intrinsically bad, but it feels almost as if Bardugo didn’t have a good idea of how to handle that in tandem with the wider over-arching plot. There were multiple times where it felt like all the external plot had paused so that the romantic relationship could develop, or so that the same character development beats could be repeated over and over again for no discernible reason. A skilled author will be able to weave plot progression and character/romantic development into one single narrative tapestry, and I didn’t get a sense that Bardugo was able to strike the balance very well from this book.

In-depth breakdown: I feel like I’ve seen some accounts of Bardugo saying that she wanted The Familiar to read like a fable or folktale, and I do have to say that she hit that mark squarely on the head with the writing style she chose. There are number of moments where the text is interspersed with words and phrases from other languages, and the writing has a lovely, lilting rhythm to it, as if the words themselves come to life when their syllables are imagined with sound, ringing a silent song in my head. And it’s so perfect for a book which uses a sense of song as one of its central conceits.

The fairytale style is as much in the writing as it is in the themes; fairytales and folklore are a refraction of our history and past, a storybook preservation of loves and fears from times before ours, and the past has so much magic in this book. The historical details are impeccable! Bardugo clearly did a lot of research into her chosen time period and culture(s), and as a result the scenes come to life in such vivid ways across the pages of this book. I was already familiar with some of the history, so it wasn’t necessarily new information, but I appreciated the detail which Bardugo wrote with because I find that writing really comes alive when it’s infused with so much detail.

The characters are also done quite well, IMO. The MC and love interest are both compelling in their goals, fears, and desires, and their dialogue is sharp and snappy and so damn clever. The side characters are varied and colorful and messy in their own ways, and I loved how Bardugo clearly had taken the time to flesh them out into whole, complete characters who could have stood on their own. My friend complained that the main romance falls into the over-done trope of inexperienced girl x broody immortal guy, and like, they aren’t wrong. But I think Bardugo differs from Booktok Romantasy Author #8239434 in that she does it well. The relationship is convincing and believable, and the ways in which the MC and love interest complement each other are written with such sincerity and care. It’s not exactly Bardugo’s fault that other authors have done a similar relationship dynamic a million times before her, and I think Bardugo’s execution of the romance is elevated for the fact that there is so much thematic depth to it; that the fact that the MC and love interest choose each other is a tangible theme in and of itself, and it means something deeper in the context of the setting and story.

So, with the amount of praise I’ve given this book up until now, you might be wondering why I rated this less than 4 stars! And it’s because of the plot. My main problem with this book is the plot.

The plot, on the surface, makes sense. It’s not illogical by any means; the line of cause and effect is easy to follow, and nothing happens inexplicably. But from a more meta/developmental perspective, this plot really needed more workshopping. It feels like the emphasis on certain things in the beginning—things that were really compelling, like Luzia’s Jewish heritage—is disproportionate compared to how much impact they actually have in the end. The beats in the beginning are also really repetitive, for no real reason. It wasn’t so bad that I wanted to DNF, but I also don’t understand why we had to repeat the exact same internal conflicts so many fucking times before anything else happened.

I complained about the plot stopping for the romance already, and I’ll complain about it again here, because it is the single thing I hate the most in romance-centric or romance-as-a-major-subplot books. A skilled author will be able to come up with a way for the characters to develop the romance while they are also advancing the plot and giving the characters agency in said plot advancement. A skilled author will be able to balance plot and romantic development in equal measure, and leverage one against the other at the same time. This is not a negotiable thing for me; I do feel it is an extreme skill issue if the author is incapable of executing this well. And I don’t feel bad about complaining very loudly and obnoxiously about it because quite frankly I find romance really fucking boring. I don’t pick up books for the romance, I expressly avoid books which are marketed as romance-only, so books which advertise themselves as something other than romance (or mostly-something-else-but-with-romance) better be able to live up to that expectation.

And you know, I get that in actual romance books people are more forgiving about this, so like I’m not going to read The Love Hypothesis or something and complain that no plot happens because the characters are too busy falling in love. But this book specifically is not marketed as romance, and all the plot events and scenes up until the Big Romance-Only Section did, in fact, advance character relationships and plot at the same time. So that was just extraordinarily frustrating to read because nothing about what I’d already read or known about the book prepared me for it! And (minor spoilers incoming) since it happens right after the midpoint, I felt like it effectively killed all the plot momentum we got from the really cool and fun midpoint turn! It just felt really fucking stupid, I’m sorry! It really pissed me off! Why did Leigh Bardugo go off and have the other characters advance all the plot off-screen just so Luzia and the love interest could have sex for a few days?!?! There was just a huge unprecedented magic incident! They could have had sex while also advancing plot events, like figuring out what that magic incident was about! It’s not that fucking hard to write! God! (end of spoilers)

Okay. I’ve said what I needed to about that. I’m good now LMAO.

My thoughts: The sheer scope of the thematic depth in this book is genuinely super impressive, and I think Bardugo was really quite intentional and masterful in her crafting of each character and thematic throughline. There were a lot that I could pick out, which I wrote a big forum post about already, but the one which resonated with me the most was Luzia’s struggle to conceal her heritage—and thereby smother half of her own self—in order to survive life under the Inquisition. The internal tug-of-war, the desperate attempts to preserve traditions and culture which would fade into the unremembered if not for Luzia’s love for her dead parents, the longing and hoping for a future in which she would not need to be invisible; all of that was written with such poignant sincerity, such a profound hurting that it felt like the sorrow ran as deep as bone. I did read Bardugo’s afterword about how she drew upon her own heritage and ancestry to write this book, and as someone belonging to a more recent diaspora demographic I thought she did a really, really good job of portraying how it feels to be lonely in the way that outsiders are lonely.

Luzia knows Madrid as home, and yet Madrid will never view her as one of its own. How do you go on from there? How does one live with that? I absolutely loved how Bardugo’s writing navigated every facet of that conflict.

To start wrapping up this massive review, I’ll say that while reading this book, I was reminded of the historical fiction novels I loved as a young girl: the Royal Diaries series centered on real life princesses and queens, the middle grade books about young women during the Revolutionary War or colonial America, the innumerable YA novels about teenage girls surviving and fighting back against dictatorial regimes. The Familiar is categorized in the “adult fantasy” category, but the lush historical atmosphere, the protagonist being silenced and silencing herself before finding love and joy in her own ability, the struggles grounded in the prejudices and zealotry of a strongly Christian and patriarchal society which actually existed—all of this speaks of a more character-centric historical novel than one of fantasy quests and adventures. And I loved it.

Beyond the nostalgia, this book captured some of the core themes I can remember from my days of being a ten-year-old enchanted by long-ago princesses and girls who lived and died and loved hundreds upon thousands of years before I was born. This book says: we are all but one, and that is enough to change a dozen lives in a dozen small, nigh-imperceptible ways. And a dozen lives changed in a dozen ways will run and gather and flow like water moving downhill, and one day you may raise your head from your own life and see that a trickle has become a stream has become a river which swells with rain from the sky and snow from the hills, and you are only one but you have become a flood.

And just like that, you have made history.

Conclusion: The Familiar is a historical fantasy novel with language that transports the reader to the Spanish Golden Age, to the glittering opulence and brutal repression of an empire born from greed and religious fanaticism. The characters and romance are beautifully rendered, and the conflict and turmoil they face become a folktale that sweeps you away in the quiet magic of a thousand lives and a thousand loves, all coming together to make a song.

⭐ 3.75/5 stars

Dark, subtle, twisted and detailed, just like everything Yoko Ogawa writes

I think this collection is a great representation of what makes Ogawa's writing so compelling. If you try it out and it doesn't work for you, then Ogawa is most likely not an author you'll enjoy