I read the final pages of Weird kid listening to live music. The guitarist was phenomenal - as was the book.

Greg has a particular knack for polishing up all the bits I love about science fiction and packaging it into that middle-grade goldilocks zone. Perfect humor and pacing for its target audience while maintaining the heart and mind of a story a fan of any age could enjoy.

Weird Kid has the best dog, 2 friends bonding over their love of comics, a kid bonding over music with his uncle and an entire town overrun with

Spoiler

alien goo

. The book lives up to its adjective. It gets weird. Strike that. It starts weird, but it's easy to write off some of the initial weird happenings as the overactive imagination of the main character. As things get a sciency explanation the weirdness and the stakes escalate.

Greg has fun with words, smushing them together like the dictionary of Dr. Moreau. Greg writes clearly about difficult topics like the loss of a parent. Greg writes equally clearly about butts. The chorus that Greg returns to is the power of love and acceptance.

I'd say this is the perfect book to get your middle schooler hooked on science fiction, but it's the fourth of Greg's I'd say that about. Together they give a pretty good survey of what drew me to science fiction and keeps me reading it 30 years later.

This is the best book I read in 2017.

Before reading this, I had a vision in my head of the downward spiral of poverty. In my experience as a middle class employed renter in Los Angeles, I've pretty much gotten what I pay for. Prime location costs more. Amenities cost more. Size costs more. If I'm willing to forgo any of those things, I can get a cheaper apartment. One of the joys of renting vs buying is that I've been able to adjust how much I want to pay for rent every few years based on those factors.

So I envision a 2 income family that loses one job and the end result is that they have to move into a smaller place, possibly in a less desirable neighboorhood and finances get tighter.

What this book throws into stark relief is how that correlation between the cost of rent and all the factors I regularly think about breaks down. There will always be a lowest rent, but what you get for that rent can still vary by other factors. The more often you've been evicted, the more power the next landlord has over you. This can lead to progressively less desirable conditions.

That's a gross oversimplification. What makes this book shine is how it follows people on all sides of the eviction system. The reader starts with certain expectations of who the good and bad guys are, but ultimately almost everyone turns out to just be a person trying to make their way as best as they can within the system. Along the way, there's as much drama as you'd expect from Game of Thrones.

Highly recommended.

I've read nothing like this before. The narration is tossed like a hot potato between various entities residing inside Ada, the protagonist. Very occasionally we hear from Ada directly. One chapter is a poem.

The plot points, place settings and auxiliary characters that a novel is usually built from exist. However, they are of little importance. The operatic struggle between the narrators and their vessel maintains center stage.

I'm unfamiliar with the spiritual framework at the core of the novel, but considerably less so than when I started it. Above and beyond the ideas directly presented in the book, I feel it introduced new ways to tell a story. I have new tools to think about my thoughts. It expanded my mind.

Awesome.

Trans women are women.

I cannot support an author who uses their platform to spread hate.