Review: YOKE OF STARS, by R.B. Lemberg

Come back to the Birdverse with this unforgettable tale about despair, hope, self-care, and friendship!

Cover art for YOKE OF STARS courtesy of Tachyon Publications. Against a turquoise and teal coastal seascape, a fiery orange and golden star dominates the top of the image. Below it, a golden phoenix bird shape hovers, with other golden birds flying above the star. At lower left, a golden swarm of sea-serpents moves in from the left margin. At right, a shoal of golden fish repeats the same pattern from the right margin. — cover art courtesy of Tachyon Publications

Words shape thoughts and cultures. Fantasy is uniquely suited to reveal this in subtle, entertaining ways that sneak in high-level concepts on the sly.

R. B. Lemberg’s YOKE OF STARS is a remarkable novella. It could only come from a skilled linguist and storyteller, and from a fiercely independent publisher like Tachyon.

In nested, partly-revealed stories, linguist Ulin and assassin-in-training Stone Orphan share past experiences…to decide which one of three people Ulin will pay Stone Orphan to kill in revenge, as the latter’s first official assassin’s contract.

Will deeply traumatized Ulin find healing from this decision?

Will Stone Orphan graduate from a dangerous, hostile school, and gain a kind of freedom?

Or will their stories interweave in an unexpected new direction?

Lemberg’s command of language and narrative nuance makes this a haunting, beautiful read.

In our current reality, YOKE offers a more-honest look at trauma, despair, forgiveness, and found-friendship without unrealistic wish-fulfillment tropes.

Readers don’t need to have read previous Birdverse stories. YOKE carefully introduces Lemberg’s world, mythos, history, and magic system.

For seasoned readers, the story offers new twists, startling linkages to other stories, and another perspective on Lemberg’s Birdverse.

For fellow word-nerds, Lemberg’s linguistic explorations are a thought-provoking journey into how language influences all of us.

A moodboard by Marian Crane, inspired by R.B. Lemberg's YOKE OF STARS. In the upper left, a pink, blue, lavender twilight cloudscape. At upper right, a garden scene of deep teal and turquoise with stylized flowering almond branches. At bottom, tan sandstone blocks laid in a severe horizontal pattern. In center, a still life of a teal marble-paper and leather book, a string of brass bells on emerald cord, a spray of pink blown-glass flowers entwined with teal glass beads, a bracelet cut from an iridescent seashell, a scattering of opal-glass charms, and a hollow ball of twisted steel wire. — moodboard photos by Marian Crane, 2024

As of April 8, 2024, this novella is on pre-order at Tachyon.

Buy it, please?

Small-presses are under immense pressure right now, as the publishing world convulses around the same return-on-investment shareholder-driven business strategies that have caused so much wasteful and dangerous upheaval in other industries.

If you don’t buy this book, an airplane won’t fall out of the sky due to shoddy manufacturing safety culture.

But if you buy this book…actually, buy *all* the Birdverse books if you can…you will be affirming and supporting a brilliant author and a brave publisher. So they can bring you *more* good stuff.

My ARC was provided free of charge by Tachyon Publications, in return for my honest review.

And yes, I did pre-order. I seem to be collecting Lemberg’s books, starting with this stunning one a few years ago: