The Black Tides of Heaven Audiobook By Neon Yang cover art

The Black Tides of Heaven

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The Black Tides of Heaven

By: Neon Yang
Narrated by: Nancy Wu
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Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as infants. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While Mokoya received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, they saw the sickness at the heart of their mother's Protectorate.

A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue as a pawn in their mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels. But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond they share with their twin?

©2017 Neon Yang (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books Fantasy Action & Adventure Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy Epic Literature & Fiction Epic Fantasy

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Neon Yang’s The Black Tides of Heaven is a fantasy tale in her Tensorate series. In this mythical world, supernatural powers are used by the Protector to suppress the development of any technology. The Protector sends her twins to a monastery in exchange for its support. One of the twins has the power to see the future which cannot be changed. The other twin (after both select their genders) leaves the monastery and becomes a smuggler and eventually works with the rebel group intent on overthrowing the reigning power structure.

Yang offers a rather simplistic mythical world with little in the way of world building. The genderless childhood appears somewhat superfluous. The characters are by and large, one dimensional and unengaging.

The narration is decent with moderate character distinction. Pacing is a tad slow.

Holding onto power by suppressing tech

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I read this book for my Queer Studies course. This is an excellent queer fantasy story.

Great Story

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I loved this story & unlearning the binary gendered approach to storytelling is the cherry on top.

A great way to get comfortable with pronouns!

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The pronouns made this really confusing. It seemed like it had a good story but I couldn't get into it because I never knew who was saying what, or how many people were in the scene.

Pronoun errors

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