Mad Sisters of Esi - BookWyrm.World

Paperback, 442 pages

English language

Published Aug. 5, 2025 by DAW.

ISBN:: 978-0-7564-2006-2

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi meets Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler in this stunning meta fantasy about the power of stories, belief, and sisterhood

Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung flees, beginning an adventure that will spin her through dreams, memories, and myths

Ask for the story of the mad sisters of Esi, and you’ll get a thousand contradictory folktales. Superstitious sailors, curious children, and obsessed academics have argued over the particulars for generations. They have wondered about the mad sisters’ two greatest marvels: the museum of collective memory that sprawls underneath our universe, waiting for any who call for it, and the living, impossible, whale of babel.

Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel. They roam within its cosmic chambers, speak folktales of themselves, and pray to their …

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi meets Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler in this stunning meta fantasy about the power of stories, belief, and sisterhood

Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung flees, beginning an adventure that will spin her through dreams, memories, and myths

Ask for the story of the mad sisters of Esi, and you’ll get a thousand contradictory folktales. Superstitious sailors, curious children, and obsessed academics have argued over the particulars for generations. They have wondered about the mad sisters’ two greatest marvels: the museum of collective memory that sprawls underneath our universe, waiting for any who call for it, and the living, impossible, whale of babel.

Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel. They roam within its cosmic chambers, speak folktales of themselves, and pray to their creator, the Great Wisa. For Laleh, this is everything. For Myung, it is not enough.

When Myung flees the whale, she stumbles into a new universe full of people, shapeshifting islands, and argumentative ghosts. In her search for Great Wisa and her longing for her sister Laleh, Myung sets off on an adventure that will unravel the mystery that has confounded everyone for centuries: the truth about the mad sisters of Esi.

Fables, dreams and myths come together in a masterful work of fantasy full of wonder and awe, that asks: in the devastating chaos of the world, where all is in flux, and the truth is ever-changing, what will you choose to hold on to? And what stories will you choose to tell?

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

None

4 stars

Your job is not to know what it once was or what it will become. Your job is to simply enjoy it.

This book opened by describing itself as a circular tale, and as promised it truly did meander through various layers of stories to get back where it started. In some ways this reminded me of the Orphan's Tales books by Catherynne Valente, in its use of nested layers of stories that all interconnect a bit to tell something bigger in the whole. But Orphan's Tales is quite explicitly a story about stories, and here... I'm unable to quite put my finger on what this book is doing. It's definitely a story about sisterhood. It's a story about the grief of inevitable separation and change. It's a story about memory and creation.

I did enjoy this book, and especially enjoyed the stories of Magali and …

Your job is not to know what it once was or what it will become. Your job is to simply enjoy it.

This book opened by describing itself as a circular tale, and as promised it truly did meander through various layers of stories to get back where it started. In some ways this reminded me of the Orphan's Tales books by Catherynne Valente, in its use of nested layers of stories that all interconnect a bit to tell something bigger in the whole. But Orphan's Tales is quite explicitly a story about stories, and here... I'm unable to quite put my finger on what this book is doing. It's definitely a story about sisterhood. It's a story about the grief of inevitable separation and change. It's a story about memory and creation.

I did enjoy this book, and especially enjoyed the stories of Magali and Wisa. I was amused the academic interludes. I liked the weird worldbuilding: magic space whales, "sailing" through the black sea of the universe of island planets, a portal that only children can go through. But overall I also don't feel like any of these elements quite cohered for me (even as I also wonder how much that's just on me as a reader).

This was our book for the September 2026 #SFFBookClub.