A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers
Okay I'll admit that I was waiting eagerly to read this straight after I finished Wild-Built. So I set some time aside today to sit by the window with a hot drink and finished it in one sitting.
The dedication for the first book is, “For anybody who could use a break,” and for this book it reads, “For anybody who doesn’t know where they’re going.
I feel like everything I said in my initial summary from the first book still stands - I love the way that these books make me feel. It still has that energy of having someone relate to me, knowing at the crux of what some of the more burdensome and human feelings someone might feel, putting words to them and allowing to work through them in one fell swoop. When I think of cosy books, I'll admit that I expect to be partially patronized but I never felt this way with the Monk & Robot books. I feel like I'm on a comfortable road trip with friends.
And really that's what this second book is, we join our friends sibling Dex and robot Mosscap as they are traveling through Panga's human territories. It's more of what is to be enjoyed from the first book though now we have Mosscap interacting with human beings in a more broad sense. We also get a really lovely chapter of meeting Dex's family - I think Mosscap interacting with Dex's baby niece is likely my favourite part of the entire book because COME ON HOW CUTE IS THAT.
I find the worldbuilding charming, not overwhelming but solid enough that I'm intrigued and sold on what the premise is. This is just a wonderfully optimistic take on humanity and what could happen if we were more or less plunged into a state of co-existance with nature. The concept of how 'currency' works was interesting for example. Family units are seen more as a potentially polyamorous situation as culture has changed after the robots uprooted themselves. There's even an interesting situation where Mosscap doesn't want to use materials from the world that they can't rightfully give back, going into a tangent about bioplastics. I think some people could have issues for how starry-eyed this near apocalypse is, but... sometimes we need to think of a future like this.
If I had to really get my nit-picking pants on, the ending kind of just...trails off but really in the scales of how much of a nice time I was having vs. this one thing, I can't even justify knocking off points or stars or whatever for it. I think that at my heart of hearts, I don't know if I can agree that humanity would really turn out this way if we were forced into a situation where our technology more or less said "see ya fuckers" and walked off, but my God do I wish we could be this way. I think I like to see these books as a little drop of hope in what humanity could be like. It's just the overall feeling of respect for life that this book preaches that I find so poignant.
Look, at the end of the day, I just want to make a robot best friend to roam around the woods with and have an existential crisis together.
!LOLZ
!ALIVE
!PIZZA