The Four Profound Weaves, by R. B. Lemburg

I struggled with this one a lot--I had read "Grandmother Nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds" a few years ago so I was a little familiar with the context, but the author says you don't need that and I believe that is correct. It helped a bit to let go of the idea that this was primarily a story with a plot, and lean into the exploration of identity. And you know what, a little bit of plot and adventure does sneak in.

The characters are fully realized, imperfect people, which seems to distress some reviewers. Benesret, the great weaver, sits right on the line between good and evil. The best thing in the book for me was the profound struggle of the Nameless Man to claim his identity, particularly since he had transitioned to a man's body late in life but did not grow up as a man and therefore was profoundly uncertain about how he fit. Us cis-gendered folks do not realize how much context we get from being raised with our genders.

The prose is heavily styled and poetic, and takes some getting used to. I can appreciate the exploration but since the book was not meant for me I can't get my arms around it.

My Goodreads Review

Grandmother Nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds, by Rose Lemburg

We have another offering tonight of an author I'm not familiar with, but the story is Nebula-nominated.  Grandmother Nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds is nominated in the novelette category--unfortunately for me the quality that stood out for it was that it felt like an entire novel.  Kind of a long one. 

The story has some promise.  The setting is vaguely North African, possibly as long ago as 4000 years.  Our protagonist is a girl in a trading family.  Magic is present and very useful, but she has none herself.  She has a brother who turns out to be developmentally disabled, thus is not accepted into the society of men (men live separately from women, doing scholarship, singing and making).  So he's assigned to be female and she cares for him.  Her grandmothers have a special item, a Cloth of Winds that fortifies those who touch it.

We get extensive descriptions of this social structure--multigenerational families of women that venture off to fight and trade, men that stay cloistered and veiled, and handling of transgender issues.  But there's vanishingly little to hold all of this social narrative together.  It ended up feeling like reading a very long lecture on some society's social customs.  There was a plot, but no real tension, for all the discomfort some characters felt. 

I give it two stars and hope the author will try again.  She can construct ideas pretty well.