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The Warm Machine by Aimee Cozza

When a robot built for construction work first sees an angular, sleek prototype military robot slink onto the base he's working outside of, he immediately falls in love. The problem is, only anomalous bots understand the concept of love, and the lowly laborbot has not deviated from his default programming once. So he thinks, anyway. When the laborbot is scheduled for decommission, the military bot cannot possibly live without him, and the two bots set out on a path to find the fabled anomalous robot utopia Root. COVER ARTIST: Aimee Cozza PUBLISHER: 9mm Press YEAR: 2024 LENGTH: 196 pages  AGE: Adult GENRE: Science Fiction RECOMMENDED: Highly Queer Rep Summary: The main characters are robots, likely closest to aro/ace but those terms aren't quite applicable. Gender is also not an important factor. THE WARM MACHINE plays with ideas of friendship, connection, and searching for utopia, all through the lens of a construction robot who falls in love at first sight with a military bot....

Messenger by Lois Lowry (The Giver Quartet, #3)

Messenger connects The Giver and Gathering Blue to show the slow creep of xenophobia in the Village that had always been a welcoming place. This is a strong entry that can stand on its own, but is much better due to what came before.

I like the way that this story incorporates the previous two books such that this story can make sense on its own, but it completes the unfinished threads of the other books so that they feel more complete. I'm very excited to see how this series concludes in "Son", but "Messenger" alone filled in a lot of what was missing from "Gathering Blue".

The dynamic between Matty and the blind man was very good. Matty is not as knowledgeable as the blind man, but the blind man clearly values their friendship, and I think Matty enjoys having someone to help. From a narrative perspective, the way that we get hints of the blind man's breadth of knowledge even when Matty doesn't have the context for his assertions was very well handled. It made them both feel like full persons even when we mostly are left with Matty's thoughts.

I'm glad that Kira didn't let Matty heal her for the journey, and that he respected her autonomy and didn't force the healing on her. The discourse about disability within these books seems to be very well handled.

Overall I liked this one and I'm looking forward to reading the conclusion in "Son".

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