Category: Book Reviews

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Klara and the Sun is the first Ishiguro novel I’ve read, and now I understand why his work is so widely loved. He writes with such grace. It takes guts to write a novel about the limitations of love from a robot’s perspective, but in Ishiguro’s hands it is entirely believable. The book itself is like the qualities of human nature that Klara is always observing–both simple and incomprehensible. There is nothing else like this. It is a balm to read, a new favorite.



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Rosewater by Tade Thompson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Rosewater is an innovative read with a lot of interesting takes on classic sci-fi tropes that ultimately make them… well… weirder. The main character is very much an antihero: self-absorbed and funny if not dismissive of nearly everything and everyone. But the positioning of Kaaro as a reluctant narrator not really bent on saving anyone’s life (or even day) creates a unique reading experience that lets us explore Thompson’s city of Rosewater without preconceived notions. It’s a neat trick how Kaaro’s gift is seeing into the minds of others, and as readers we experience something akin to that as we witness his perspective. Everything is presented as a little bit broken and dirty here–grey morality abounds.



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Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is an odd, hard-to-find, little sci-fi title from 1976. It won the Hugo that year, and reminds me quite a bit of Huxley’s Brave New World, though it came along 50 years later. Both books feature central male protagonists who are cranky about a status quo that works to erase individualism via genetic and chemical means. However, what I really appreciated about this book in comparison to Huxley’s was its massive multigenerational scope, which Wilhelm still somehow handled in a very gentle storyteller way. The tone is strange–half Laura Ingalls Wilder, half hard sci-fi. Even as I’m writing this review I’m not exactly sure how to review it. Ultimately, this is a novel of ideas that rotates around the axis of this question: if you could only prepare for the next generation, and you only knew what the previous generation knew, and that knowledge was shifting with every go-round, could humankind survive? If so, what would it take?



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