The Book Quest!: 'The Black Tides of Heaven' by JY Yang

I have finished it! My original feelings still apply, but I have more I can say now.

The Black Tides of Heaven is a silkpunk fantasy novella that follows two twins who are given to a magic monastery as payment for a favour the monastery did for the Empress. One of the twins later develops the ability to foretell the future.

We follow the other twin.

It's a really good book! It's got strong characters, a lovely style, and I love the worldbuilding about gender. In this setting, everyone chooses their gender. You have to choose it by adulthood, but plenty of kids pick too. There's lots of exploration of this-- both in the macro level of what sort of gender roles you get when people deliberately pick the roles, but also on the micro level, about how different characters choose their gender, and how they live as that.

But it is mostly a book about relationships, and relating to people, and what it means. ...I'm not sure that's what Yang would describe the book as being about, but that's what I think it is about?

My one little quibble is that it's a novella that covers ~30ish years, so there's a lot of timeskips, and so some relationships don't feel that fleshed out, because we skip straight from first meeting to 'have basically been married for the last few years'.

But overall I'd recommend it, especially if you like fantasy with gender worldbuilding.