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Ian McDonald: Hopeland (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom, Tor Books) 4 stars

A time-traveling, futuristic saga of a family trying to outlast and remake a universe with …

Incredible

5 stars

I loved everything about this book. It is inspiring and hopeful. The "found family" aspects are wonderful, without being so overwhelmingly positive as to render them completely unbelievable.

Now that I'm through gushing, I will say that many people will not like this book. It has many aspects that I typically despise in books, starting with the fact that not a whole lot actually happens despite the immense length of this tome. (Someone who recommended it to me described it as "a massive slab of a book.") At one third of the way into this I still had no real idea what it was about, and even by the end it is difficult to concisely describe. Is it possible to say I highly recommend this, while also warning that a great many folks will not be happy with it? Despite it ticking a lot of the boxes that usually make a book unlikeable for me, I felt good while reading this, which overrode all the analytics of what I generally like an dislike.