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When a post-human spacecraft and a human love each other very much...

Overall, I had mixed feelings about this book. The writing is from the third perspective of Jayanthi (the human) and Vaha (the post-human Alloy pilot/spacecraft), but is very much in each of their thoughts. Subjectively, it felt like a matter of fact writing style that just didn't quite grip me. I wish I could pin down more why I struggled here with this prose. That said, there were a bunch of things I enjoyed about it:

This book played with some neat ideas. One is that "all matter possesses some level of consciousness" and thus people are encouraged to change themselves rather than environments were possible (big To Be Taught, If Fortunate feelings). Jayanthi has sickle cell anemia, and the book uses this as a prime example of talking about how bodies are not good or bad but rather ones that are more or less suited to particular environments. Along these same lines, the Alloys can go through a process of "full rebirth" and totally change their bodies and genetics, although there's some limits there.

There's a surprising amount of disability topics here too. Jayanthi declines at several points to change her biology to remove ways in which its perceived as hindering her (as well as declining to edit her mind to remove unwanted desires [!!!]). There's also some bits about Vaha's relationship with prostheses and relearning to fly that I think were really well done. All in all, it's more disability politics than I expected even if it feels like a number of perspectives lean on some pragmatic reasoning that "biodiversity is important" and "your lifestyle adaptations may provide useful knowledge to others". (And, these also seem like Jayanthi's own biased perspective as well.)

This is a very different story than a A Half-Built Garden but there's some echoes of it regarding the parentalism towards humans and the climax of the book focusing on legal arguments. In this book, I feel like the Alloys have a more well-trodden "can't trust these humans based on their past behavior" bent (vs the Ringers more novel "our own vast experience tells you you're wrong"), but I feel like this book takes it to new places, where it tries to ask questions about how to determine when a group of people have changed enough to be owed self-determination.

I love the concept of the Wayward Children series as a whole, but individually a few of the books have been hit or miss for me. If I had to pick, In an Absent Dream and this book have been my favorites out of the whole series, largely in that they both focus on a single character and so the plot and theme can be a lot more tight in the short space of a novella.

Lost in the Moment and Found follows Antsy, who runs away from horrific step-dad, finds herself lost, and steps through a door into the Shop Where the Lost Things Goes. (I also deeply appreciated the Author's Note which precedes the book and content warns for grooming and adult gaslighting, but also gives the reassurance that "before anything can actually happen, Antsy runs.")

In this book, the reader gets teased with larger worldbuilding hints about the Doors and how they operate, but thematically for Antsy it's all about abuse and loss. She's literally lost and in a shop that collects lost things; she has lost trust in adults and the safety of the world; by the end, everything she's lost all ties together really satisfyingly. Some more spoilery thoughts.

Six months after Abby was born, her mother sat her down in the living room and took her hands, as she'd done twice before. Antsy sat rigid, having learned that these were the moments where her life changed for the worse, where things she didn't even know could be lost were ripped away from her and thrown aside.

This is a minor detail, and I certainly differ a lot from Antsy on many points, but boy howdy did this quote hit me right in the psychologically unsafe "serious conversations" feelings.

I read Olga Ravn's The Employees ("A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century"), and this book sure has some attributes.

The format of this book is ~entirely in disjointed and anonymous (confessional?/professional)? statements to an off-page undescribed committee.

Statement 015 I'm very happy with my add-on. I think you should let more of us have one. It's me and yet it's not me. I've had to change completely in order to assimilate this new part, which you say is also me.

Statement 011 The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that's why I'm drawn toward them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of an insect captured in amber.

I've included two partial statements here for flavor from adjacent pages, because this is the only way I feel like I can convey the Annihilation-esque vibes of this book.

The book opens with a preface that these statements are to help improve future workflows and prevent future deviation(!). There's a lot of creepy workplace language of productivity and add-ons and forced updates, but the book itself dwells more on employees struggling with uncertainty about what it means to be a human or a constructed humanoid.

I am still not sure what I think about this, but I am glad to have read it.

I came to this book through a Twitter thread by the author explaining the difficulties she had in getting it published and promoted: as it centers on a young woman and has a romance in it, it was assumed to be YA and was seen as problematic for depicting parental and sexual abuse, which frustrated Reid as she as writing gothic horror for adults. I had been perceiving it as YA myself and so avoided it, but knowing the above, I sought it out.

The Books That Burn review on this page is an excellent summary, so I won't bore you by repeating it! I'll just tell you all the things I loved about the novel.

The heroine. So often, female protagonists in fantasy/historical fiction fall into the same stereotypes. Marlinchen defies them. She is quiet, weak, oppressed; her instinct is to placate and obey. She is afraid much of the time. The great rebellions of her story would be minor events in others. She is not pretty. I LOVE her. She's an excellent example of how a character can be passive/reactive while still having agency.

The romance.The romance with Sevas very much serves the plot and Marlinchen's character development - the story is not "a romance", it is not something with a plot plotline and a romance plotline that intersect at points. Sevas is also just as much an oppressed and penned-in character as Marlinchen and the two of them find comfort, joy, and safety in and for each other. Genuinely so compelling.

The worldbuilding.I love a good fantasy world centered strongly on a real culture, pulling from it in ways that deepen the world and also keep it coherent. This one is quite Russian, but also with its own history - it's a city in a region that was recently annexed by not!Russia, and very quickly built up around Marlinchen's family home. A great way to combine the old magic/folktale feel with a post-industrial culture!

It was amazing?

Admittedly I love sarcastic female leads with devastating one-liners, but I really liked this book. It's a fictional take on an episode in Patricia Highsmith's life, when she was anonymously writing low-grade comics while penning what would become Strangers on a Train, followed by The Price of Salt, later renamed Carol.

The muted color palette effectively captures the grayness of Patricia's life, between her boring jobs and the rest of the world telling her she should stop being a lesbian. An occasional pop of orange signals a rare moment of excitement, and I love how Hannah Templer renders shadows in the thriller scenes, or how she mimics old comic books style to illustrate Highsmith's stories.

There's also a little mise en abyme here, that makes us realize just how far we've come since then: the story shows a lesbian writer in the 1950s, struggling to sell a novel with lesbian main characters that get a happy end at a time when putting your name on a comic book would be career suicide. And now in 2023 we get to read about it in a comic book crafted by two queer women, that features a problematic queer lead and won an Eisner award this year.

I remember hearing about the book "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson in my fifth grade science class. The story of a women scientist who sounded the warning about the danger of pesticides and chemicals in the environment was told almost like a legend. Indeed, the book itself has had an impact far beyond its content. It ranks as one of the most influential books of the 20th century and one of the few works in human history that can be said to have a direct impact on how we live and understand our world. The books reputation is well-deserved. It is a damning critique of modern society and our over-reliance on technology, chemicals, and poisons to attempt to dominate and control nature. Carson concludes that, like the threat of nuclear war, humanity's use of increasingly deadly forms of toxic chemicals in agriculture put into the power of our own destruction in our hands.

The book works for a variety of reasons. First, the book is lucid in the best tradition of popular science writing, making its points clearly, concisely, and with deep erudition. Second, the book is in the best tradition of ecology, which emphasizes the fundamental interconnected of all life on earth. Third, Carson is a very good writer who writes brilliantly and poetically. The fundamental strength of the book is that Carson balances strong scientific understanding with the ethical and moral component of the subject. She is genuinely angry at the damage wrought to the environment. I would argue that without this balance, the work either becomes a dry academic text or an angry polemical screed.

Finally, Carson always keeps the effect of chemical pollution on human bodies and human activities firmly in her narrative at all points. You can mention the damage done to bird populations and that will make people sad. But mention that these birds are the birds that people like to listen to in the Spring and people will begin to take notice of the direct on their own lives. "Silent Spring" lives up to the adage coined by Upton Sinclair about his novel "The Jungle," which took place among immigrants in Chicago who worked for the meat-packing industry. While his novel was supposed to be focused on the exploitation of workers in the factories, people were more disgusted with reports of rats in sausages and rotten meat. The led Sinclair to remark "I aimed for [readers'] hearts but I hit their stomach's instead." Carson was able to make people understand viscerally the effect that these chemicals have on the world around us, in the food we eat and the water we drink, and residing in our very bodies.

Many things have changed since "Silent Spring" was written. It led to the banning of DDT worldwide. In many ways it kick-started the second environmental movement. But Carson's fundamental charges against man's obsessions with technology, government inaction in the face of industries, and the hubris that we can control our environment, are still just as potent as ever.