This was such a rich, thoughtful, deep meditation on travel and cultural exchange. I found the writerly prose a bit much to take (especially because the narrator struggled with it a bit), but I can see what Samatar is doing, and she does it very well. 

Some of the details were exquisite: the way Lunre's teaching was not a foundation in Olondrian literature, but a foundation in Lunre's own taste and enchantments; the delicate connection between Jissavet's vallan and other islanders' jute (sp? I listened to the audio book--the physical external soul doll), which Jissavet, being a Hotun girl, lacks. The way Jevik starts describing her as a ghost--the islander word--but quickly switches to referring to her as an angel, the Olondrian word. 

Some of the details didn't quite work. The careful poetic language, for example, got a smidge purply, and I was never fully clear on why Jissavet's ghostly visitations were so agonizing to Jevik.

But what most struck me was the intricate connection that Samatar weaves between literacy and culture and cultural clash. The Tinimavet islanders are entirely illiterate, while the Olondrians have a vast literary culture, which captivates Jevik through Lunre's teaching. Indeed, it captivates Jissavet too, who comes back from beyond the grave to demand that it make room for her. Within Olondria, the coming clash between the religious groups also revolves in part around literacy. The Cult of Avalei represents those illiterate Olondrians who have been oppressed for so long that their own culture is at risk of disappearing entirely, but as they fight back, they fight back by destroying libraries, thus preserving themselves at the price of the past. But then, it's not their past, so what matter? And yet we see all of this through Jevik's eyes, and Jevik has very little stake in the fight, except inasmuch as he loves Olondrian books and writing, and indeed brings the tradition to Tinimavet at the end. When the dust settles in Olondria, it may well be that the islands are the remaining home to literacy in that part of the world. The glorious cultural heritage of Bain, which so captured Jevik's imagination and desire as a boy, will be preserved only as a memory, an outsider's contribution to islander culture, imported and filtered through Jevik's eyes. A stranger in Tinimavet, if you will. And, indeed, this recalls exactly what Lunre is, in the end. He carries the memories and writings of Olondria with him, but he in the end adapts himself entirely to the islands. He will never look like an islander, but he lives and loves as one of them. Lunre is the personification of literacy, and his story is the precurser to the arrival of literacy in the islands. It's all beautifully done.