wondrously surreal and heartfelt <3

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders is about a friendship and rivalry and romance between a witch and a mad scientist. It opens when the two are children and coming into their callings and it ends years later in San Francisco when they are established adults. Reminds me a bit of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series. http://pussreboots.com/blog/2020/comm...

I came across this book after all the accolades it had received, and I must say despite the premise I felt intrigued to venture into Anders' universe. The book can be summed up as being one of three very distinct narratives - the first 1/3rd was fast, clever, delightful, mysterious and a fantastic blend of fantasy and suspense. The 2 1/3rd changes in tone very quickly as the reader is taken through a lot of internal conflicts of the characters. The final 1/3rd just felt rushed and haphazard. In the end, the book did deliver a satisfying conclusion, albeit with many unanswered riddles and head-scratching moments, but all in all, the book lives upto it's fantastic premise built on the strength of it's first 1/3rd part. Would recommend, it's an easy read and keeps your interest just enough for you to read it through.

A good first half. Interesting premise. Hilarious at times. Second half sputters out unfortunately. Character and plot development begins to feel forced. Major tone shift halfway through the novel (starts out feeling YA then not at all but then sort of but still not??). Starts out like a 4 star read, probably ends as a 3 star read, but a half star for the inventiveness of the story and the blending/genre-bending of sci-fi/fantasy/magical realism.

I enjoyed it enough to finish, and parts were certainly interesting. But a bit of a deus ex machina ending, and it just never felt like the stakes were high enough for an end-of-the-world story.

Quick read. Really interesting love story and apocalypse tale.

I'm kind of on the fence about this one. I was *really* enjoying the first part (which was surprising since it was about little kids), but then the tone of the book changed. Suddenly there was this rather serious story that was dealing with really heavy real-world issues told with a kind of flippant, super casual voice. This just created a kind of narrative dissonance that kept me at arm's length from the characters. Also, and really this is probably my biggest beef with the book, the author doesn't seem to trust that her audience is smart enough to remember anything she's already told us. For example, Laurence spends a good fourth of the novel dating (and mentally agonizing) over a woman named Serafina, but just a few dozen pages after the Big Moment, Anders somehow feels it necessary to remind us of the details of Serafina's relationship to Laurence in a brief reunion before the climax of the story. This is just one example since there are several characters, situations, or items that were explained multiple times as if they were appearing for the first time. Please, please, dear authors, learn to trust the intelligence of your readers! Consistently reminding us of rather important details that we already remember feels too much like you're writing to fulfill a minimum word count requirement. Besides these issues, it was a decent book. I suspect that later novels might show more confidence in her own ability to communicate, thus resolving these issues. My general "meh" reaction after finishing it still leans on the positive side of "meh" and doesn't necessarily preclude me from reading any of Anders' other work.

Enjoyed more that I thought I would. Had from the library but was not likely going to read, then saw Roxane Gay's review and decided to give it a go. For some reason with this one, I was able to buy into the fantasy and just go with it.

Amazing book that i couldn't stop listening to. Magic vs technology at it's finest. This is going on my favorites shelf and i highly recommend it.

A strange/interesting fantasy/sci-fi about two tormented middle schoolers with special skills (she’s something of a witch and he’s a science wizard) who are misunderstood, and have a misunderstanding that keeps them apart for a decade.

Lemme think about this a little before I write a review.... Ok, here goes. I was really looking forward to this book. I spent one of my precious Audible credits on it. But now I think I might have liked it a bit better if I'd eye-read it instead of listening to it. Some books are like that. Sometimes hearing a book narrated can REALLY make a book. (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I'm looking at YOU.) Sometimes it doesn't. The story is about two lives that meet, converge, diverge, and then converge again, even though the two people involved have taken very different paths. Patricia becomes a magician; Laurence becomes a scientist. (Y'all bear with me if I spell the names wrong. You do lose a lot of the spelling of names when you only hear an audio version.) The world is falling apart anyway, due to climate, war, and all the usual reasons. The two different camps have different philosophies on how to save the world. The writing's quite good, I think. Patricia & Laurence both seemed pretty well-drawn characters. I think the plot got a little odd toward the end. So: 4 stars for the writing, slightly less for the plotting and the ending. I do look forward to more by this author.

Mixing up science fiction and fantasy is hard. It's the sort of thing that makes for a fun game environment, but can easily fall apart in fiction. Charlie Jane Anders' debut novel takes the challenge on, and in many ways is *about* the very challenge it is taking on. This is a book with two protagonists who seem to live in different books. Laurence is a science hero. Patricia is a fantasy heroine. The novel is the story of their relationship, but it is also a story of brinksmanship and mad science and crazy action and environmental collapse and AI and magic. It is a fun romp, but a super smart book. It's grand, but intimate. Think of your favorite nerdy person. This book is like that person, kinda. I've given it 4 stars right now. If you're reading this review a few weeks or months from now, the score may be 5. I need to sit with this one.

Es ist keine schlechte Geschichte, auch wenn ich nicht wirklich verstanden hab, ob es nun um das Schicksal der Welt oder das der beiden Protagonisten geht. Ich verstehe allerdings nicht, warum es zu den Finalisten des Hugo Award 2017 gehört - ScieFi beinhaltet es sehr, sehr wenig.

Absolutely fantastic. I felt my own anxieties about the current state of the world fully represented in the story and it just pulled me in deeper. I felt the ending was a bit of a let down but would recommend strongly still to everyone.

While I like the writing style this book was really frustrating to read. So many things don’t matter in this book it drove me nuts. The proclivity where actual important information is dropped casually and is often nonsense drove me bananas. Often times information the characters are privy to isn’t explained about another character until much later in the book. I think it’s supposed to wet your appetite until you get that information but it was done so frequently I just honestly didn’t care or was annoyed when dropped. Like hinting at Ernesto’s condition and then casually dropping it. The plot felt really haphazard and there was basically no through line of themes, or they just didn’t hit and felt like they were tied into later, again casually and in passing. Made it seem like 75% of the book is just there for no real reason. There’s lots of pop culture references and stylistic languages similar to The Magicians. Swearing and jargon and nerd references. But while Magicians does this to kind of ground the fiction in a way that says ‘this could be our world now and we wouldn’t know it’, there is no internal logic to this world at all. There is some charm in how the world is expressed through the characters but it gets less charming and more frustrating about halfway in when it feels more like someone just wanted to throw some cool shit in without explanation, while swapping to the lives of the two main characters that, again, are pretty much just bloated with stuff that I GUESS would throw you off what the book is about and or headed? But instead just completely undermines any semblance of stakes or plot that the book attempts. All this is to say, this book is not for me, apparently.

Loved this. Wasn't sure if I would, but it took me by surprise and didn't let go!

Hakkında hiç bir şey bilmeden okuyunca çok şaşırtıcı gelen, değişik bir kitap :) Elbette herkese göre değil, ama zaman geçirmek için çok güzel...

** spoiler alert ** Wow i was expecting this book (based on the cover and lis' recommendation) to be one of those really contemplative and poetic and lyrical novels about the beauty of artificial intelligence and computer science.... really did not expect all that contemporary san francisco life stuff? My expectations were so different from reality that i cant help but feel disappointed and slightly betrayed, which is my fault obviously, but meant i was constantly waiting for the revelation that they were in a simulation all along / patricia herself is an AI on her journey to consciousness or whatever...... but it just never came... Nevertheless, the ending was really beautiful and made the out of place big action sequences worth it. Pretty sad that there wasnt real closure w most of the characters (especially roberta) but i guess that was done deliberately.

Liked the story at first and it was easy to understand. But after a while it got confusing because of the different Povs and Timezones. I didn’t liked the theme with the Robots and technology, it wasn’t for me and then I just wanted to finish it. But I enjoyed it as an in between read.

My feelings for this book are so confused. I loved how weird and quirky it was. I loved Patricia and Laurence, despite their flaws. But I was disappointed by the ending. But then I loved her acknowledgements. Gah!! This book won’t be for everyone. The geek in me loved it. I might reread the ending. I don’t know. Maybe if I read it in sunlight instead of the ice storm that’s currently raging outside my window. Or maybe I need to be out in nature. I don’t know. But I do know I want to read more by this author. Does that make sense??

Rating: 2.5/5 Genre: Adult Sci-Fi/Fantasy Recommended Age: 15+ (mature language, mature scenes) An ancient society of witches and a hipster technological startup go to war in order to prevent the world from tearing itself. To further complicate things, each of the groups’ most promising followers (Patricia, a brilliant witch and Laurence, an engineering “wunderkind”) may just be in love with each other. As the battle between magic and science wages in San Francisco against the backdrop of international chaos, Laurence and Patricia are forced to choose sides. But their choices will determine the fate of the planet and all mankind. In a fashion unique to Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky offers a humorous and, at times, heart-breaking exploration of growing up extraordinary in world filled with cruelty, scientific ingenuity, and magic. – Amazon.com Here is a book that I thought held a lot of promise, but didn’t really grab my interest a lot. I thought the concept, while lofty, was really intriguing and that the character development was really well done in this book… but beyond that I didn’t like this book. I thought that the book’s plot was not very well developed. It had a lot of good build-up but in the end the book failed completely to explain and resolve the major conflicts in my opinion. The pacing was very weird as well. The timing skips around a lot and the way the author writes the book is a bit weird as well. You really do have to pay attention to the book and to the writing in order to completely comprehend the book, which is probably why I failed to understand this book. I was trying to get through this book quickly so my husband could read it for our book club and I felt that I either missed some things in the book or the book didn’t do a good job at explaining to me what was going on. Verdict: I felt completely let down by this book that I believe could have been a really great sci-fi vs. magic book. I feel that the writing was wonky, the book too hard to comprehend to some readers, and that the book had some major flaws in it. I wouldn’t totally count this book out as it is marketed as a national bestseller, so I would give at least the first part of the book a quick read through to see if you like it, but for me it just wasn’t something that I enjoyed.

The first half of this book was a solid 4* book, but it just collapsed in such epic fashion in the end that it dropped down to a 2.5* overall. There were many problems with this book. First of all, and most noticeably, the author seems to have difficulty portraying relationships well in this novel. Every relationship was either non-impactful to the characters or non-impactful to the reader (impactful in the story but I couldn't care less). Even the romance between the two main protagonists, two people who've known each other since middle school, seemed strange. You would think that writing a romance element for two characters who have spent the majority of the story together would be natural but this author managed to prove me wrong. Also, it seemed like the author could only portray adults in one way - abusive. Is literally every single adult in the world a bad person who sets out to torment our protagonists? The author would have you think so. In doing this, not only is it eye-rolly unbelievable but also makes the adult characters seem 2-dimensional and carbon copies of each other. The book also time skips around weirdly. One chapter could be held in the present, the next chapter 5 years ago, and the next chapter 6 months after then initial chapter. It was just so confusing. Non-linear storytelling is completely fine, but there needs to be clarifications about how much time has passed, etc. The characters often remark "I feel like it's been a year" and I'm here wondering how long it's actually been. Also because the story tends to skip forward a lot, a lot of the story is told retroactively. It kills whatever potential impact the story could have had by having the reader experience the events alongside the characters instead of us just reading a recantation of what happened several weeks ago. Okay also, the magic system literally makes no sense. I know there's a certain degree of suspension of belief in fantasy/sci-fi novels but this is just ridiculous. The witches and wizards can seemingly do everything and nothing. There's no basis for the magic they do.. All the reader knows is that their magic is based off of "tricking" someone. That still doesn't explain how our protagonist literally pulls some girl back to earth from some cross-dimensional space (??). We get several chapters on the protagonist at the magic school but somehow still learn nothing about how magic actually works! Instead, we get a nice but useless story about how the school threw the protagonist into an Eastern European city all alone and she had to "heal" someone which she eventually accomplishes by spitting into her soup? I do commend this book for trying to merge the genres of science fiction and fantasy though. I thought that was a highly laudable effort even if I thought the story took a nosedive near the end. I can't help thinking that this would have been a god damn amazing book if just ONE person in the entire story knew how to communicate properly with people around them. Maybe talk to someone before blowing up their life work? Maybe talk to someone before mass murdering them? Maybe talk to someone instead of trying to murder children?? I don't know.. maybe it's just me.

4.5

Laurence and Patricia are odd, outcasts, and hyper-intelligent, but in far different ways. They become allies as children, but their differences eventually cause a huge rift. They reconnect as adults, but are on opposing sides of an increasingly hostile conflict between magic and science. This book is so odd! I had a blast reading it, and I loved how Anders just plops you right into this world of science (time travel watches!) and magic (talking to animals! curses!) and expects you to keep up. Very different, and maybe my best read of 2016 so far. I always love when I can find a standalone Sci-Fi novel that doesn't make me feel like I'm too short on details. My only gripe concerns the 'romance' between the two mains, which I thought was unnecessary or perhaps just not explored enough for my liking.