All the Birds in the Sky

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

The book starts off sounding like a light-fantasy childrens. Book. The narration sounds like children book narration. The girl can talk with animals. Then it seems to pivot to young adult. The girl is in middle school. She is obsessed with nature. There is a boy that is obsessed with technology. Both are loners. They end up becoming friends.

Then the novel goes off the rails.

They try to identify people by shoes. They identify one as an assassin. It turns out he is an assassin. And he wants them dead. He tried to get her to kill him. He has a super-computer AI in his closet. They both get framed and ostracized. He gets sent to military reform school. She and his AI help to save him. She gets invited to witch training school. And that is just the first section.

The book migrates further in time. She is a witch that helps people to feel better (but is careful not to aggrandize herself.). He is a tech-bro who continues to work to spread humans to other planet. They finally meet after 10 years. The book moves to a near-future San Francisco. The locations all seem fairly well placed. The technology is moving towards a conflict with magic and destruction of the world. The girl and boy have a major falling out, but get back together and make appropriate sacrifices to save the world.

I wanted to like the book. It started out fairly relatable. However, the scenario was just a bit too carried away to be believable. They were living in something that was very much like our world, but felt too different from it. 

The Morning Star

I try to avoid reading reviews before reading a book. However, this was a long audiobook, so I decided to take a peak. The first review I found described the tedium of the book. Uh oh! I did not have high hopes. However, the book pleasantly surprised.

The book follows the lives of a number of everyday people meandering around contemporary Norway. There are the normal conflicts and struggles of everyday life. There are also a few unusual things that happen. The members of an occult teenage rock band are found murdered in a gruesome fashion. There is also a new star that appears in the sky. Some of the characters interact with these events. Others don't.

Then near the end, the novel gets "weird". There is a long essay discussing death. It would fit in well in a philosophy book, but seems a little out of place in the novel. There is other analysis of religion, science and ways that we seek to understand the world. Some of the characters "see" the dead and have some struggles with them. This relates to the death essay, but also brings what was a fairly natural novel into a supernatural realm. These various twists and turns are well written and stand fairly well on their own, but feel a little odd together.