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This book has a number of flaws but it does one thing well - the author is very inventive in creating a zoo of fantastic/magical animals. Those passages describing the animals, their behaviour and their enclosures are the best part of the book. She also seems to be rather knowledgable about the work behind the scenes of a zoo. If you're in any part critical of zoos, though, this book would be very frustrating. The only criticism is only presented once and is rather superficial. I appreciate the effort of the author to make the protagonist someone with anxiety but unfortunately, she comes off as rather annoying and also immature for someone her age for about half of the book. There thankfully is some character growth eventually. The pace picks up at around the halfway mark and while the mystery turns out to be somewhat predictable in the end, I enjoyed the book overall. Objectively, it only merits 3 stars but it felt more like 4, so I'll settle at 3.5.

It took me nearly 2 months to listen to the audiobook for this novel because of life happening, and I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to meet this book and its characters as they came to life in my ears.

The novel is told through several different perspectives, primarily of a 70-year-old woman, a 30-year-old man, and an octopus. There are some others, but these three are at the forefront.

The octopus, Marcellus, provides commentary on the human condition and acts kind of as the behind the scene eyes for the reader. On the other hand, the humans are constantly dealing with human style drama and coming up with or failing to come up with human style solutions.

There's a lot of good humor, but tragedy too. Reading along, I was reminded that people are complicated and we never stop growing into who we are, even at 70 years old. There's a lot of pain in the hardship out there, but a lot of good stuff too, and even though humanity has a tendency to fall into the absurd, we can be remarkably bright features too.

This book isn't even 100 pages long, so I finished it in a single sitting, and I don't regret doing that. I loved Ray Nayler's debut novel and this short novella was just as great, if not better in many ways.

He tackles so many serious issues with such sincerity and depth despite the length and the multiple character perspectives really highlight the positionality of different people in society and how it affects their views and what they care about and their memories. Obviously what can't be ignored about this book is the idea that you can bring back extinct species and the underlying current of the climate crisis and humans and destruction, but those issues weren't really at the forefront of my mind as I was reading--they only came later.

This book showcases breathtaking cruelty, but also a heartbreaking kind of kindness too. Very good. Will buy whatever he publishes next.

I've never cared much for stories that incorporate telepathy. Usually it adds little except perhaps a novel way to depict the violation of a beautiful woman's consent (looking at you, Star Trek The Next Generation). But Karen Lord uses telepathy to explore intimacy and consent in a positive way, albeit set against the backdrop of a genocidal catastrophe. Our heroine, Grace, is a middle-aged civil servant who gets assigned to be a liaison between her government and a group of refugees who have come to make a new home on her planet after theirs was destroyed. Not only that, but because of the stricter gender roles in the refugees' society, the survivors skew male at a rate of about 80%. So they and Grace set off on a cross-planet adventure to visit various communities whose values and genetics are compatible with the survivors' in order to help them find wives in a way that does not disrupt the existing society's mores. This may sound far-fetched, but in the notes, the author says that this was based on real events, specifically the aftermath of the south Asian tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004. A great many fisherman survived due to being out at sea when the tsunami came, while their wives and children, at home on a Sunday in their homes along the shore, mostly perished. Along the way... well, that's the whole story, isn't it. Ultimately the tale brings us all around the planet (which Lord says she envisioned as an intergalactic version of the Caribbean), hints at some time traveling as well, and then concludes on a hopeful, wholesome, and almost romantic comedy-esque note. I really enjoyed it and it's inspiring me to go back and try "The Galaxy Game" again.

@MamaLake@beige.party *lose multiple generations' worth of wars!

✓ for read, * for intend to read, ! for never heard of it. Or whatever amuses you.

Which 2023 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
Metronome by Tom Watson
Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick ✓
The Anomaly (translation of L'anomalie) by Hervé Le Tellier
The Coral Bones by E. J. Swift
The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard ✓

This is a story about what we preserve in the face of incalculable loss, inspired by the real life histories of scientists, librarians, and archivists rescuing and defending knowledge during war, famine, and collapse. In this case, the collapse is a projected future where the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, flooding NYC almost completely. Although it is an extremely bleak future, it's not without hope or respite.

As an upstate New Yorker who has traveled through many of the places mentioned in the book, I found the author's imagining of how various communities along the Hudson and beyond would react to the shutdown of international commerce, advanced medicine, and so on to be scarily plausible. I learned a new word from this book, one that the author did not invent: "hypercane," a category of hurricane that has been proposed but not yet recorded, with sustained wind speeds of 500mph (800kph). Scientists theorize that this type of storm could occur when ocean water temperatures reach 50C (122F).