This review originally appeared in Interzone #288, September–October 2020).
Uiziya e Lali and the nameless man known as nen-sasaïr live in a world where magic is real and one can change one’s sex. A cloth of transformation, woven from the wind, summons sand-birds of bright fire. They cocoon the summoner, who burns without burning before emerging as the desired sex. They attribute this ability to the goddess Bird – who gives the series of stories of which this novella is a part its overall name, the Birdverse – but from what we see in this book it might well be a symbiotic biological process that has evolved on this world.