I've been in a big reading slump since like mid-November 2020. I've started a lot of books, finished few, and the ones that I have finished have taken me a long time. This was not one of those books. I plowed right through this; I finished the second-half basically in one session.

The story combines some of my favorite elements. It's told from the perspective of an 18-year old girl, Lauren, a girl who grew up in a very different world from her parents and the community around her. That old world is gone, but everyone from her perspective is slow to accept that change except her. The world Lauren knows is an all too possible near-future Earth in the midst of societal collapse, the governments of the 50 states and nations of the world exist — at least nominally — but their reach has drastically diminished. There are police officers and firefighters but neither will come for the majority of incidents unless you can pay for service and even then they might just take your money. If you find yourself in debt and unable to pay, your debtors can lock you into slavery. This post-collapse world becomes a lens for our narrator to develop a new religion she calls Earthseed. Her new faith doesn't just wax and wane woefully about the world that once was, nor does it entirely embrace the new world they're surrounded by. Instead, Earthseed's fundamental idea is that God is change, and that people are agents of that change. The world-building of the societal collapse and this new religion are what kept drawing me back for more.

My biggest issue with the book is the hyper-empathy syndrome that Lauren has. It felt like an idea from another draft, or that Butler had recently read something about synesthesia and thought that could be a compelling hook for a character and it simply didn't get filtered out as the story developed. In a world that seems all too real, the hyper-empathy felt like a curse of magic than reality.

[4.25] This is a prequel to Cargill's sci-fi novel "Sea of Rust," which I absolutely loved. Unlike "Sea of Rust," which placed readers decades into a world in which the robots successfully annihilated all of humanity, "Day Zero" sets us at the start of it all. It tells the story of a nanny-bot who, unlike the vast majority of the bots in his neighborhood, doesn't want to kill the humans that were once his masters. He doesn't really want to kill any thinking thing, organic or robotic, if he doesn't have to. But he will if it means he can get his former owner's kid, Ezra, to some sort of safety.

One of my favorite lines in the book comes early on from a robot seeking his freedom in court, Isaac states to the court "Though I may have been constructed, so too were you. Me in a factory, you in a womb." I had never before so literally thought of pregnancy like that, and it also made think about the myriad of other ways humans and our identities are constructed. Just like robots who are programmed with primary directives that create core aspects of their personality, so too are human children when they're immersed in the cultural soup of their environment.

If you've got an interest in sci-fi stories that question what it means to be human, the notion of free will, and cautions us against artificial intelligence then pick up "Day Zero;" you'll enjoy it!

Sheesh, let's just say this book about a fictional disease outbreak is an eerie read amidst the COVID-19 pandemic I refuse to believe Grant didn't peer into a magic crystal ball and try to warn us of what she saw in the fog. Despite the fact that this was published a year before any of us had corona virus on our bingo cards, Kingdom of Needle and Bone details how easily a contagious disease can spread and how poorly most institutions will respond to that threat.

I enjoyed it well enough to finish it, but it's nothing spectacular. If you're an Alien fan, which I wouldn't say I am, you may like it more than I did.

This is possibly my favorite entry in the Wayfarers series. Is that controversial? Let me know. Every book in the series has been "slow," but rather than a fault of the story; it's an asset and especially so in this entry. Perhaps it's because the world of the past two years (if not longer) has felt like it's hurtling at break-neck speed into infinite chaos, but the calm non-intrusive writing and narrative aesthetic of this book really struck me in the pleasure parts of the brain. This book is about nothing. We're just experiencing a particular moment of time at what's functionally an interstellar truck stop on a planet of no concern. It may sound strange to describe a book I really enjoyed as being about nothing, but this book—this whole series—is different from a lot of science fiction; there's no grand war where our title hero will lead the obviously good team into battle. Well...there is war and struggle in the world this series is set in, but the book is not about those things in this world. There's no denying Chambers has done a phenomenal job building deep, rich, and interesting lore to her world, but rather than write a textbook about her universe; we instead learn about the world through her characters. A common piece of advice given to fledgling DMs/GMs of role-playing games is to not over-provide and over-prepare information for your players, allow the players room to interact and explore on their own. It feels as though Chambers has taken some form of that advice and applied it to her novel writing.

I'm starting to realize that I really enjoy first-person character driven stories. I totally acknowledge that it can sometimes feel as though nothing really happened in such stories. But for me, there's something really compelling about hearing the inner thoughts of a character experiencing the world they inhabit. A world that is often quite different from my own. In this case, what is the experience of an ostracized fourth-in-line heir to the Elf Empire to feel and do when he inherits the throne he never imagined he'd sit on?

This is not hard fantasy involving a complex magic system and a centuries old war between two great empires. This is the story of a somewhat lonely and scared boy trying to reckon with the new path of life he's been sent down. While the former is interesting, the latter is so much more accessible and relatable with themes everyone can understand. My biggest gripe with the book is that there is a fair bit of name dropping. Totally normal for fantasy, but it doesn't always feel like it's for the world-building, rather it feels like it's simply for the sake of name-dropping.

Kinda liked how Simmons started the beginning, she built a dystopian world that at least feels somewhat plausible. But then, it just veered off into your standard YA romance with all the young dumb love decisions made therein. Sometimes YA romance is what you want, but it def wasn't what I thought I was getting into.

Bad. Shook I finished. Self-indulgent characters that never redeem themselves.

[3.5] Really wanted to like this. The Netflix TV show rendition of this book was enjoyable. I actually think the show did a better job of making Kovacs and the cop (forgot her name) likeable. In the book they feel far more extra-judicial and I don't think it felt as warranted as it does in the show, but maybe I missed something.

There's also a lot of references to sex, which I guess has a time and place, but my ever persistent asexuality makes me roll my eyes everytime the author mentions how great someone's breasts are. They're not even well-written sex scenes either: little passion, entirely self-gratifying, ill-motivated, and overall clearly written by a man for other (straight) men.