All the Birds in the Sky Paperback – April 11, 2017

Before I write this review, I want to tell you about something I hate, and something I love. (Don't worry. This is relevant, I promise.)One Thing I Hate: When I was a kid, I hated going to the bookstore and seeing one big section labeled "Science-Fiction and Fantasy." These were wildly different genres to me (an admitted nerd), and I found it baffling that we shoved them together, considering they had little, if anything, in common, apart from perhaps the perceived audience.One Thing I Love: The more I read, the more I love books that refuse to abide by genre boundaries, and the more in awe of them I am. Writing in a single genre is hard enough, but mixing your genres can be doubly hard, to say nothing of the risk you take in alienating an audience that doesn't want unexpected shifts. But for me, there's something exhilarating about books that defy expectations and easy categorization, because to me, that's what life does.So, what does all these have to do with All the Birds in the Sky, the debut novel from Charlie Jane Anders? Well, Anders' novel does that thing I love, and more than that, it would be one of the only books I know that easily would fit in that strange hybrid genre bookstores created, because it's that rare book that mixes science-fiction and fantasy elements seamlessly, interweaving the two and playing them against each other in rich and satisfying ways. And if that's not enough for you, it's a coming of age story, a quiet romance, a YA novel, a dystopian/post-apocalyptic tale, and more, all while completely working in a way you wouldn't expect from something that ambitious.So what is this book about? It's best to go in relatively cold, so I won't go too much into detail, beyond telling you that the book's early pages focus on the friendship between Laurence and Patricia, two kids who'd be comfortably labeled as "outcasts" by most of their peers. Both come from dysfunctional homes; both are more talented than they'd first appear; both enjoy the company of the other, who seem to accept them for who they are. But what we know, and Laurence and Patricia don't come to understand immediately, is that they come from two different worlds. Because while it's evident from the early going that Laurence is a techno-geek, one who makes two-second time machines and artificial intelligences, Patricia's talents seem to be more fantastic and supernatural - indeed, they seem to be drawn from the world of witchcraft.That conflict - between science and magic - makes for fertile ground, and All the Birds in the Sky embraces it, letting that schism and divide drive the novel as it develops in wild an unexpected directions. And every time you think you have a handle on it, it slides away from you and evolves. Oh, you think it's a YA tale about two friends coming to terms with their destiny? No, that's only the early going. Oh, it's something in the vein of The Magicians, with the underground world of magic and how we connect to the real world and ourselves? Nope, it's not that either, nor is it an easy tale about how science can save the world from our worst impulses. Indeed, one of the great joys of All the Birds is seeing how the book constantly defies expectations, evolving and shifting while remaining true to its characters and its themes, all throughout.Enough can't be said about Anders' craft, which doesn't just create a lushly imagined and crafted world, but populates it with memorable characters down to the smallest supporting role. More than that, there's her wonderful command of tone, which can slide from comic hilarity (a casual reveal and apparent side story in the early going about a man at the mall is laugh out loud funny and absurd) to heartbreaking, from wondrous to nightmarish - but every one has the same command of craft and ability. And more than that, there's the amazing story, which spans years and half the planet, and touches on man's responsibility to the planet, science ethics, redemption, and more, all while never losing sight of these two characters and their bond. It's rich, imaginative, wild, and more than anything else, it's incredibly humane and beautiful in ways that just made me smile. And that, I think, is the best thing about it - the top of a very long list of great things. (Well, that and the fact that this is Anders' first novel, which hopefully presages a long career to come.)

I’ve been following Charlie Jane Anders’ career for a couple of years now, and so I was super excited when I heard that she released a science fiction/fantasy novel. She was a writer and editor at i09, a science, science fiction, and pop culture news blog. Charlie Jane Anders is also the host of Writers with Drinks, a cross-genre reading series which you should definitely go to at least once if you like science fiction or literature and live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before All the Birds she published two short stories for Tor, a coming-of-age novel about a choir boy, and a humorous guide to casual crossdressing for men and transwomen (The Lazy Crossdresser).Since i09 and Writers with Drinks are both crossgenre mashups, it’s not surprising that All the Birds in the Sky follows suit, sitting directly on the line between science fiction and fantasy and refusing to be pushed to either side. The structure of the story weaves the two threads of magic and technology together as well as is probably possible (the plot does have a couple of holes, I’ll get into those later). It’s about a girl named Patricia who’s a witch and a boy named Laurence who is a computer wizard. The story starts with the main characters in middle school, skips a few years, and then picks up their story again when they are young adults living and working in San Francisco.One of my favorite things about this book is it gets middle school SO right. Well, at least from the perspective of a social outcast, with all the melancholy, isolation, fragile friendships, and social pressure that comes with that… but also the positive side of finding things that you love and learning more about yourself. Patricia can do some real magic and Laurence finds joy in invention, but both are lonely and misunderstood at school. The school-age chapters highlight how girls and boys are bullied differently, with boys often suffering physical abuse at the hands of their classmates and girls being excluded or vilified by their peers (the kids at school think Patricia’s a Satanist).Their outsider/loner status persists and flavors their adult lives. Patricia is constantly being warned by the other witches to stop taking on too much by herself. She doesn’t socialize with the other witches and thus is considered suspect. Laurence is extremely successful in his work but his dating life suffers from his lingering sense of inferiority. The only person that each main character gets along with is each other (and even that is less than rock-solid). This leads to one of the major problems with the novel – there are a lot of side characters, but only one of them influences the plot and the rest are little more than scenery.This example is meant to show Laurence being overwhelmed by a succession of party guests, but it is illustrative of the problem:“A short older lady with wide glasses on a string, and black-and-white hair in an elaborate bun, started telling Laurence about the time her shoe had fallen in love with a sock that was much too big. A tall, handsome Japanese man in a suit, with a neat beard, asked Laurence questions about Milton’s finances, which he found himself answering without thinking. And a young person of indeterminate gender, with short spiky brown hair and gray hoodie, wanted to know who Laurence’s favorite superhero was.”The side characters are quirky and I guess memorable, but the way they’re described as a collection of quirks doesn’t give you any sense of their personality. One thing I’m not fond of in Anders’s style is the tendency to describe action or dialogue in summary. It gives me the feeling that full immersion is too taxing on the attention for both the writer and the reader, so it’s being skipped over to get to the ending faster. It feels as though someone is telling me the story instead of letting me watch the story unfold. I read this a couple of months ago and forgot a lot of it so I decided to reread it and write down all the events to try and hammer down the plot before writing a review, and I found that once I distilled the plot down to one page, the only side characters whose actions pertain to the main story are Theodolphus Rose, Carmen, and Isobel (and Carmen and Isobel only at one moment).Roberta is a pretty strong character, but aside from being the catalyst for Patricia discovering her powers, she’s not really relevant to the events of the second half because she’s so far away. Theodolphus Rose is also only relevant to the first half, although he makes appearances in the second. He doesn’t even come close to accomplishing his objective, and the way he goes about carrying out his mission in the first half doesn’t make a lot of sense (spoiler: he’s an assassin trying to kill Patricia and Laurence, but his Order won’t let him so he tries to convince them to kill each other, instead of doing something sensible like getting Patricia to give up magic or Laurence to stop inventing. In the end, he is probably the cause of the disaster he dreaded. If he hadn’t pitted Laurence and Patricia against each other, they wouldn’t have been separated, and the magical realm and the Ten Percent Project would have had better communication and maybe worked together instead of trying to destroy each other).Carmen and Isobel are Patricia and Laurence’s mentors, respectively, but Carmen only comes in when (spoiler: she shows Patricia the Unraveling) and Isobel’s actions are only important when she (spoiler: holds the gun to Patricia’s head). We never see Carmen or Isobel doing any mentoring. Isobel scolds Laurence and Carmen tells Patricia to hush up. Other than that, they don’t really interact with their pupils. I had a clear visual image of most of the characters, since their appearance was well-described, but I feel like I didn’t get to know them because I didn’t see them really do anything indicative of character. This is most obvious in the case of Taylor, whose main character trait is that she or he is of indeterminate gender. Taylor appears in a couple scenes, and says something that scares Patricia once, but until the end they’re just kind of there. It’s kind of annoying to me because a character who is physically well-described but doesn’t do anything or have enough lines of dialogue to give me a sense of what kind of a person they really are is a bit like hearing a joke without a punchline. Pretty much all of the side characters (Ernesto, Diantha, Kevin, Serafina, etc) annoy me for this reason.*** NOTE: Skip this part if you don’t want the ending spoiled ***There is a riddle at the center of the book which leaves the reader hanging. The riddle is, “Is a tree red?” It comes up a couple of times in the book. The first time is when the birds ask it to Patricia and she says she needs more time. The second time Laurence asks it to her. Then Patricia asks it to Peregrine, and it shocks Peregrine into consciousness. Then Patricia forgets about the riddle until the very end of the book, when the Parliament of Birds asks if she’s come up with an answer. She goes through a couple of situations in her mind in which a tree might be red, but decides she can’t answer the question for a tree in general and simply says, “I don’t know.” The birds accept this, but to the reader it feels like a cop-out. I see that’s good to have an open mind and not profess to know things you don’t know, but to have the central question in the book be something so random and meaningless… is something only Charlie Jane Anders could pull off! Haha. And I guess the point is to flout the reader’s expectations for closure, but this is a little extreme and feels a bit off-the-cuff and lazy.In addition, the whole ending scene feels anticlimactic. The day isn’t saved by anything Laurence or Patricia do, but by Peregrine. When Laurence puts Peregrine into the magic tree, Peregrine just magically makes the Unraveling go away. What’s worse is that making the Unraveling go away doesn’t solve the problem, since the world is in the middle of ecological collapse and the witches destroyed humanity’s only escape plan. Actually, everybody’s doomed at the end because the witches destroyed the thing that could have helped humanity survive, and Peregrine destroyed the thing that could have helped everything else survive. So everyone’s going to die. THE END.The birds were right – it was actually too late! Well, hopefully now magicians and scientists will have better cooperation since Laurence and Patricia are back together for good. It would be really interesting to see a sequel to this with Laurence and Patricia figuring out how to rebalance the biosphere.*** You can start reading here again ***I know I just sounded really negative on that last page, but the cleverness, humor, and insight on the individual lines make up for a lot of the plot problems so I ended up rating it a 4/5. I’d like to close with my favorite quote from the book:"He was Laurence of Ellenburg, and he was unflappable. Laurence had just figured out that “unflappable” did not have anything to do with whether people could mess up your clothing, and now he used that word as much as he could.“I am unflappable,” Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he’d thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him."

“All the Birds in the Sky” is chock full of weird and wonderful ideas and characters. Not everything works (when Patricia and Laurence aren’t together, the book tends to slows down to a slug), but Anders is a hell of a writer and this is a debut to cherish. And it’s funny too!

Se existe uma disputa, às vezes velada, entre a ficção-científica e a fantasia, ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY é (ou, ao menos, deveria ser) o livro para colocar um basta na rixa. Charlie Jane Anders combina com gosto as duas vertentes num romance sagaz e lírico sobre uma garota e um rapaz com visões de mundo e aspirações, que, ainda assim, ou melhor, apesar de tudo isso, insistem em ficar juntos.Editora do site io9, que aborda cultura contemporânea ênfase em geek, Anders sempre escreveu sobre ficção-científica e fantasia com a mesma paixão, e traz aqui nova perspectiva sobre ambos, nas figuras de Patricia Delfine e Laurence Armstead, dois adolescentes que não se encaixam nos padrões da escola onde estudam, e encontram, na amizade um do outro, a possibilidade de conforto. O futuro, porém, os afasta. Ela se torna bruxa, e ele, uma espécie de cientista maluco.Ela pratica magia e é capaz de falar com pássaros. Ele está ligado a invenção de uma máquina que pode destruir o mundo. Alguns incidentes, na escola os separaram, mas anos depois os dois se reencontram e retomam a amizade, num mundo em colapso. E o que poderá impedir o fim do mundo: a magia de Patricia ou a ciência de Laurence? Ou ainda, a combinação de ambos?Anders se vale de elementos típicos dos dois modos de narrativa, coisas que beiram o clichês, mas que ao juntá-las acontece mágico, no qual a soma das partes cria um todo ainda maior. Há traços de Neil Gaiman, mas também de Ursual K. LeGuin e de Kurt Vonnegut, mas, ainda assim, algo completamente novo, quase inclassificável que a autora criou com seus personagens e sua trama. É uma história de fantasia e ciência, mas também de amor.All the birds in the sky marca a estreia em romance de uma autora a se prestar atenção. Sua linguagem é poética, seu humor peculiar, e seus personagens soam como pessoas ordinárias envolvidas em situações extraordinárias. E a fusão dos dois modos aponta para uma necessidade de diálogo e compreensão mútua para se evitar a destruição do mundo. Nada mais acertado.

This book is just so weird but lovable at the same time. It is a touching story of two awkward friends who fall in love in spite of their very contrasting personalities. The book also has a good message about nature conservation. The prose is non-linear, with some arcs left open and can be a bit irritable at times. All in all, a must read for age groups 10-40.

‘All the Birds in the Sky’ is a wildly imaginative, beguiling, thrilling, frustrating, imperfect blend of hard sci fi and magical realist fantasy, all wrapped with enough genre detail to make any nerd happy.It centres on two characters whose lives cross at various points - Patricia, a witch, and Laurence, a scientist. The book opens with two wonderful chapters on their childhood experiences as unhappy outcasts and the awakening of their respective abilities, both of which come to be massively important (for the fate of the world no less) as the story unfolds. These two central characters are believable and sympathetic, and I ended up becoming very fond of both of them, warts and all. The supporting cast of characters is perhaps not as skilfully drawn (a few of them blurred into one for me), but what Charlie Jane Anders does create is a believable world where witchcraft and futuristic science co-exist. The world is familiar in many ways (some of the early chapters hardly read like speculative fiction at all), but with wrinkles of magic and gadgetry that somehow just work without ever seeming out of place. Anders gives us a reality where characters can fly and talk to animals and where geeks build wrist mounted time machines, but also where parents often do the wrong things despite good intentions, kids get picked on at school and love is confusing and elusive.Narratively the book isn’t perfect, there’s a somewhat weird sub-plot that runs throughout involving an assassin which I would happily have seen edited out and other things feel like they are missing, with a somewhat jarring leap from the main characters’ adolescence to adulthood that I felt might have worked better if there had been an intervening chapter on those few missing years. Part of me wants to say that Anders’ talent as a storyteller doesn’t quite manage to keep pace with her wonderful imagination, but in all honesty what problems there are with the book are quickly forgotten in the rush of brilliant ideas and the gripping race to save the planet. For good measure, she throws in some lovely, and convincing, romantic elements; as well as insightful observations on the awkward process of becoming an adult.“I am unflappable,” Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he’d thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him.So whilst ‘All the Birds in the Sky’ is not without its faults, it’s impossible not to recommend it. If you’re a dreamer, whether those dreams are of spells or spaceships, you’ll find something to delight you here.

La autora es fantástica, vi varios vídeos de ella por youtube, y supe que iba a ser un libro especial.