Three Books by Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers

I've now read three books by Becky Chambers, and they're all good. I feel I'm in safe hands with anything by her I might pick up. Two of the books are adult science-fiction, and one is young adult (science) fiction, but from my perwpective it's easy to see a common theme in all of them: Portraits of people being cool to each other. Which is very welcome.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

This is a coming-of-age quest set on a small planet (moon) at an unknown time and place. The hero is a young "Tea Monk" who is very good at that job (which consists of traveling around by bicycle and sort of bearing witness to people's hard days) but who nonetheless feels that something is missing in their life. This leads to a mild quest, which leads to a meeting with a wild-built robot. It's the first time in hundreds of years that there has been contact between a human and a robot, and the two of them travel around together. .. And that's pretty much it. There's no Villain, there's no world-encompassing Problem, there's not even anyone who's angry! It's SUCH A TONIC. I read this out loud to the kids (On Jonathan's recommend) and it was great. It's a little slow, but it works out. There are a couple F-bombs here and there, as well as some positive references to sex to handle as you see fit. There are additional books based on these characters, but I haven't followed them up yet.