{"id":10984,"date":"2025-10-31T17:12:57","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T21:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10984"},"modified":"2025-10-31T17:13:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T21:13:37","slug":"someone-you-can-build-a-nest-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/31\/someone-you-can-build-a-nest-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Someone You Can Build a Nest In."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

John Wiswell won this year\u2019s Nebula Award for his novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In<\/em><\/a>, while also making the shortlist for the Hugo for Best Novel and winning the Locus Award for Best Novel. It\u2019s a queer love story that tries to approach some enormous questions about the meanings of family, secrecy, and what it means to trust and be trusted, but it gets bogged down too much in the details of how its shapeshifting protagonist works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shesheshen is that main character, a shapeshifter with no natural form who lives by eating living creatures \u2013 including humans \u2013 and absorbing their body parts to create facsimiles of them, although she* can also use inanimate objects to take the places of bones and other hard physical structures. Thus she can imitate a human\u2019s form and even some of its senses despite lacking a circulatory or nervous system. She recalls being born from a sac of eggs within a host human and having to defend herself when her siblings tried to attack and presumably eat her, eating them instead to survive. She lives in a castle outside a town whose residents fear a \u201cwyrm\u201d in the countryside, and the story opens when three adventurers, one the scion of a noble family, invade the house to try to kill her \u2013 despite not knowing what manner of creature she is \u2013 and collect some sort of bounty. She survives the battle but is wounded, and when she wakes after a fall, she finds herself in the care of a traveling woman named Homily who rescues her and nurses her back to health. Shesheshen develops feelings for Homily, something she has never experienced before, which becomes far more complicated when the full picture becomes apparent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* I believe Wiswell used she\/her pronouns for Shesheshen, while specifically identifying other characters as nonbinary, but obviously the concept of gender for a literal shapeshifter is a bit silly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shesheshen learns early on that there\u2019s a connection between Homily and the people who want her dead, and also realizes that Homily thinks she\u2019s a human, but despite coming close multiple times she decides not to tell Homily the truth until much later in the story (mild spoiler, but obviously that reckoning is coming at some point). This presented the most compelling aspect of the entire narrative, even more than the \u201cwill they\/won\u2019t they\u201d between the two main characters or the eventual conflict between Shesheshen and the Baroness Wulfyre, who has sworn to kill the wyrm and take its heart so that she can lift a curse on her family. Instead, Shesheshen goes through the very familiar and normal set of rationalizations as she vacillates between coming clean \u2013 hi, I\u2019m a human-eating monster of no fixed shape, also I think I love you \u2013 and avoiding the inevitable conflict and recriminations, both of the actual truth and her choices to deceive Homily for what turns out to be quite some time. It\u2019s a superb portrait of the internal monologue that people who are conflict-avoidant (raises hand) go through, and the lies we even tell ourselves to rationalize our decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n