Rainer reviewed A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
Really wonderful speculative fiction
5 stars
Wow this story blew me away. The future that the author paints and the way that the dandelion networks operate is really a true work of art. I loved the characters, the themes, and the perspective of this book. It gave me a spike in my already-elevated levels of climate anxiety right in time for the Inflation Reduction Act to get passed, so it coincidentally made that win much sweeter (even though that bill isn't perfect).
Giving the book 4.5 stars instead ofb5 because I felt a bit of a disconnect between my reading style and the authors writing style that made it difficult to comprehend some sentences on a first read. Nothing too difficult, just a bit of a disconnect where I had to read sentences a few times and it knocked me out of the reading flow.
This book is really beautiful because it does what we need speculative cli-fi to do - it imagines a future world in ways that inspire hope and action. Particularly as an IT person who works with a conservation science org, this book shifted the way I see both digital networks and also conservation work.
Very well worth reading.