Skip to main content

Featured

Kinship and Kindness by Kara Jorgensen

Bennett Reynard needs one thing: to speak to the Rougarou about starting a union for shifters in New York City before the delegation arrives. When his dirigible finally lands in Louisiana, he finds the Rougarou is gone and in his stead is his handsome son, Theo, who seems to care for everyone but himself. Hoping he can still petition the Rougarou, Bennett stays only to find he is growing dangerously close to Theo Bisclavret. Theo Bisclavret thought he had finally come to terms with never being able to take his father’s place as the Rougarou, but with his father stuck in England and a delegation of werewolves arriving in town, Theo’s quiet life is thrown into chaos as he and his sister take over his duties. Assuming his father’s place has salted old wounds, but when a stranger arrives offering to help, Theo knows he can’t say no, even if Mr. Reynard makes him long for things he had sworn off years ago. As rivals arrive to challenge Theo for power and destroy the life Bennett has built, ...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

All The Birds in The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Childhood friends Patricia Delfine, a witch, and Laurence Armstead, a mad scientist, parted ways under mysterious circumstances during middle school. But as adults they both wind up in near-future San Francisco, where Laurence is an engineering genius and Patricia works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world’s ever growing ailments. But something is determined to bring them back together—to either save the world, or end it.

TITLE: All the Birds in the Sky
AUTHOR: Charlie Jane Anders
PUBLISHER: Tor Books
YEAR: 2016
LENGTH: 313 pages
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: Genderqueer/Nonbinary Minor Character(s).

All The Birds in The Sky is about connection and isolation. It plays with the scale of reality and the drama inherent to lived experience to show two lonely kids learning how to grow up, and distributed consciousnesses connecting.

I love how this book takes the dichotomy of magic and technology and just... runs with it. The narrative has a kind of shuffling structure, where some plot thread is being advanced in every scene, but not evenly, and sometimes a lot of things happen all at once. It meant the first part of the book felt very slow, but about a fifth of the way through it began picking up and there was a snowball effect. Every scene is doing many things, some of which take a while to show up, and some which are evident immediately. I read this in less than two days, and still there was enough of a slow burn that some threads closing were able to surprise me because they had space to develop and close.

There's a lot of sorrow here, because it's about learning how to be better and how to cope, there's a lot of early stuff where things are terrible and they don't know how to handle it yet. That part was pretty rough, but even though not everything gets better, they learned ways to deal.

Patricia and Lawrence are quirky and cute, their dynamic changes throughout the book as they become different people. I really like how they change over time, how they grow (positively and negatively) throughout. It's not a linear progression, and that makes it feel more real.

It's about witches, magic, wormholes, technology, talking birds, a talking tree, and self-aware AI. 
Seriously, check this one out. 

CW for abusive parents, parental death, torture (implied), sex (explicit), bullying/abuse (explicit).

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link


White birds with red heads and black wings fly through the title and the author's name



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts