A review by mossybean
The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

challenging dark reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This is a hard book to rate for me, because there were parts I really didn't like just as much as there were parts I loved. I liked the two main characters a lot. Most of the characters had interesting stories attached to them, though I thought there were too many, especially for such a short book! For example, Nadiya meant a lot to the two main characters, but nothing to the reader as I didn't know anything about her. And again,
when they went on the pig hunt
there were so many characters that were introduced all at once that I knew nothing about and didn't have an attachment to either. 
I loved the idea of Cad, the maybe-intelligent parasitical fungus. I got really invested in the outcome of Reid's struggle with Cad, as she finds it worsening over the course of this novella. I also loved the idea of this community that functioned off everyone's equal participation in working, but that wasn't a focus of the book sadly. 
I think there were a lot of different ideas that could have been expanded into a longer novel, and in some ways I felt cheated that there wasn't more. Reid is struggling with a decision- whether or not to leave her community, her family, to go to this university in the Domes. Most of the book though, the consensus remains equally divided on whether or not this university is even real, and this contention isn't really resoved by the end.
There was tension built there, I was excited about learning about the Domes and the university and what might happen there, but you never find out. It ends in Reid deciding to go, but we still don't know towards what.
 
I really disliked this one chapter,
where suddenly there's a sexual interest added between the two main characters. There was nothing hinting at them being more than friends, and they didn't have that kind of relationship you could expect would go that way. I imagined them as like brother and sister, so it was gross!
I also wasn't a fan of the hunt, where there seemed to be a lot of gore and violence with not enough reason for it. 
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