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Lighter and more liberally uplifting than I expected, though not all strong, the late chapters on the shifts in society as we ceased to treat schizophrenia, epilepsy, etc as personal moral failings stand out. From mostly neuroscience cases and psych experiments lens pushes at any gaps for spontaneous decision making separable from our histories of a second, an hour, a year, a millennium. Then moves into implications for society, primarily our societal morality and justice system's injustices built on individual responsibility.

Mixed feelings: the premised analogies for losing people and people losing themselves are well othered, and there a few sub-stories, on theater and mothers, that are heartfelt. Irked me as far from a coherent book, however.

Maintains the high bar of the first book for gripping sci-fi for a mid-grade audience, adds in several new complications without going awry.

The rising seas setting and class divisions among our characters thrown together in emergency are richly thought out for this novella, but the plot turns could have used more room and reflection.

Readable tour through infrastructure's reflections of our collective cultures, in its histories, dependence on social pasts and futures, and the agency it gives us individually and en masse to reduce labor and lessen daily focus on basic needs. Maintenance and the shifting baselines of climate bring our attention now to the need and opportunity to redesign infrastructure to address a larger collective future.

@rainer I would guess not, this book is limited to pre-parenting in one way or another, the uncertainties of new terrain, and leans to forgiveness over judgement. While I may have missed a traumatic trigger, the big obvious ones for parents don't feature here.

A writer joins a research ship to Antarctica and entangles the story of climate change and polar exploration with that of pregnancy and bringing life into our future, with glaciers collapsing, with the crew and scientists lives and hopes and wonder. Beautiful.

Hard to recommend, hard to finish, hard to put down. Focused on the grief and guilt of surviving, with the background of the surviving and oblivious world left to imply healing and reconciliation and accommodation.