Tag Archives: Becky Chambers

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

by Rebecca

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, a Monk and Robot Book
by Becky Chambers
2022

I enjoyed the first book in this series, and I think I like this one even more. It feels particularly relevant to my life right now as it considers what it means to have or not have a purpose, dealing with burnout, and the yearning for something undefined but different from what you have. Each of the six chapters is its own little mini-story on Dex and Mosscap’s journey from the deep woods through the rural and farming communities towards the central city. They’re not quite stand-alone stories but feel like individual stepping stones. It’s an overtly philosophical book, as the philosophy is not in the narration or the plot, but very specifically in what the characters are struggling with.

It’s also very open-ended. I can hope that there will be more books in this series, although I can understand why there might not be: the questions the characters and thus the author is asking are so very hard to answer. But I think even with just two books, this isn’t a duology like I’d thought when I read the first book, because the story doesn’t conclude with this second book. The characters are on a long meandering path that doesn’t have a definite end point, that they don’t want to have a definite end point.

It’s remarkably soothing and meditative. It’s also imaging a world where everyone has enough and no one is struggling just to survive, which is something that seems both entirely possible and also so out of reach. It leaves me yearning for something more, but also with the thought that maybe I can try to reach for that something more even if I don’t quite know what it is or how it will go.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

by Rebecca

A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Beck Chambers
2021

This is a charming book that struck me immediately as a mixture of Nghi Vo’s The Singing Hills Cycle and Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot series with a bit of Mai Mochizuki’s The Full Moon Coffee Shop thrown in for good measure. It is also the first of a two-book series and I definitely need to check out the second book. Our main character is Sibling Dex, a monk who has been a gardener for many years but decides at the beginning of this book that they have received a new calling to be a tea monk: someone who travels around the countryside with a pop-up tea stall to provide the populace with tea and comfort. I do love fictional religious explorations and narrow focus narrations too about the tea and the carriage and the villages.

The setting is a quiet futuristic post-industrial utopia on a moon, several hundred years after the Great Awakening when the robots that manned the factories spontaneously developed awareness and declared that they were going to depart human society to explore nature and they didn’t want to be followed. In response, humanity had a Great Transition where they found a balance with nature and since have lived in essentially bucolic comfort. The exact details are not delved into, but it’s against this backdrop that Sibling Dex finds themselves yearning for something more than they have while being confused about how they can be dissatisfied with what they have. And yet.

And it is Sibling Dex, in the midst of their struggles to identify what they need that’s more than what they already have, who makes the first contact between humans and robots in centuries, with a robot who has come to see how humanity is doing. It is very much a culture clash of individuals who are both trying their best but also thoroughly confusing and confused by the other.

No solutions are found by the end of this book, but conversations are had and explorations of both ideas and locations. But overall it was very sweet and extremely relatable.