nerdyprettythings's Reviews (515)

Wow wow wowww. It’s so good, it’s as great as everyone has said. Set in Minneapolis in 2019-2020 and all that entails, on top of being from the perspective of a Native woman who was incarcerated for a decade, it’s a little bit ghost story, a little bit the-real-horror-is-reality.

I took a few months reading this on and off. It worked well for this book. It’s set in Britain in the late 1800s and the MC lives several different lives in 5 or 6 years. Sometimes her life changes so drastically that it feels like a different book. She is a mess and I am obsessed with her story. Also! Especially for being written in 1998, I feel like there’s good stuff in here about performing gender, done especially purposefully because of the book’s setting in the late 1800s, when clothes were very gendered. It’s done explicitly when the MC is a stage performer and later living as a boy, and more subtlely when she has ~feelings~ about seeing an old dress of hers.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to an advanced copy of the audiobook. 
I love the Monk and Robot novellas with all my heart. Despite their short length, they create this cozy (but so vivid!) world where robots once became sentient and humanity had to reckon with how it had used machines to overtake the planet. 
Everyone in the book, especially our leads, approaches others with such softness, with a desire for understanding rather than an agenda. In this book, Mosscap (the robot) is on a mission to finally meet humanity and learn what they need. It is accompanied by Sibling Dex, a monk who, despite going through all motions, always struggles with whether or not they are doing what they should with their life and how they’d feel if not. It is such a relatable feeling, despite their life of biking the countryside alongside a robot being about as far from average as it gets. My preorder of the hardcover comes in tomorrow, and I know I’ll be reading this (and A Psalm for the Wild-Built) again in print. 

I loved this book. I was rooting for the main characters hard, and the author even managed to have me missing the characters that are picked off earlier. The book managed to weave in several ideas - the author mentions school shootings and forcing children to hide, but there’s also clearly class warfare and commentary on the rich acting like they get somewhere without the work of the poor. Forcing a sacrifice from the little people while maintaining that being wealthy is owed to them. The horror was great, the characters were great, and I even loved how it ended, despite how much I would have enjoyed spending more time with this world.