Reading: All the Birds in the Sky

There was a lot of buzz about Charlie Jane Anders's All the Birds in the Sky when it was first published, and I bought it after reading several positive reviews and seeing it had won a Nebula Award and was nominated for the Hugos. It sounded charming and fun and rather sweet; a story of two childhood friends, a witch and a scientist, reunited in adulthood and having to work together to save the world.

However, I really didn't enjoy it. I managed to get to the end rather than abandoning it, though at least part of me wishes I hadn't bothered. I didn't like the archly hipsterish narrative. I found the central characters, Patricia and Laurence, unlikeable and self-absorbed and couldn't bring myself to care about their relationship (especially at the point where they were both obsessing over that rather than the deaths of millions of people), while the supporting characters were all paper-thin and completely one-note, with the exception of the assassin from a secret fellowship of assassins, who appeared to have wandered in from a completely different novel, probably by Neil Gaiman, and whose story just tailed off halfway through the book without ever being properly resolved. In the first part of the book, dealing with Patricia and Laurence's childhoods, the supporting characters were also all appallingly abusive and neglectful, which didn't really sit comfortably with the novel's rather whimsical tone; I got the impression that the ghastliness of their childhoods was supposed to be funny in some hyperbolic way, instead of just utterly grim. Similarly, the main plot twist of the second half, when Patricia and Laurence are adults, is a catastrophic weather event caused by climate change, which seemed much too grim for the novel's general tone. (It may of course be that the whole point of the novel was supposed to be to show how awful humanity is, obsessing over small things and personal issues rather than trying to solve the problems we've created for the world. I'm not entirely sure I'd disagree with that assessment, but I have the news to tell me that; I don't need it in a novel that was described as being charming and magical.) I also didn't feel that the plotting was very coherent; the ending didn't really resolve the crisis that had been built up throughout the second half of the book, returning instead to a question from the very beginning. Really, it felt as though Anders had tried to shoehorn two novels into one, and it didn't quite work.