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All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders

Why we're reading this: Mentioned in "Writing between Genres"…more
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May 29, 2015 Lisa Eckstein rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2016

As a child, Patricia discovers she's a witch who can speak to animals. Laurence builds a very modest time machine from complicated instructions he finds online. When they meet during the hell of eighth grade, Patricia is struggling to understand her mysterious magical powers, Laurence is inventing more advanced machines, and both of them are tormented by peers and parents who want to squash their talents. The two outcasts are drawn together into a complicated friendship that ends badly. By the t As a child, Patricia discovers she's a witch who can speak to animals. Laurence builds a very modest time machine from complicated instructions he finds online. When they meet during the hell of eighth grade, Patricia is struggling to understand her mysterious magical powers, Laurence is inventing more advanced machines, and both of them are tormented by peers and parents who want to squash their talents. The two outcasts are drawn together into a complicated friendship that ends badly. By the time they find each other again in San Francisco ten years later, Patricia is a powerful witch and Laurence a technological wunderkind. The state of the world is grim, and they're both determined to save it, but their approaches may be in cataclysmically dangerous opposition.

This book is a wild ride through magic and science and love and the looming apocalypse. The characters are wonderful and complex, not just Patricia and Laurence, but also their eccentric witch and scientist friends and their intriguing antagonist (and one-time guidance counselor). The story kept me turning pages when I really should have been getting some work done, and it kept me guessing through many unexpected plot developments that led to a satisfying conclusion.

While Patricia and Laurence live in a world where fantasy and science fiction are real (though not widely recognized), they also occupy territory very familiar to me, where people problem-solve over dinner, binge-watch Red Dwarf, and reflexively make Doctor Who references. I love the way Anders loves and writes about this world and blends it seamlessly with the imagined elements. There's additionally an exaggerated, cartoony aspect to the story world that bothered me during the early parts of the book, but later it either dropped away or stood out less.

The quirky prose fits perfectly with the story's embrace of different types of weirdness, and I highlighted so many sentences that made me smile. As kids, while the characters people-watch at the mall, "Laurence thought the two women in smart pumps and nylons were life coaches who were coaching each other, creating an endless feedback loop." At a Chinese restaurant, "the General Tso's Chicken was a little too general." And when worldwide disasters proliferate, somebody confesses, "My biggest fear about the apocalypse isn't being eaten by cannibals--it's the fact that in every other postapocalyptic movie you see someone with an acoustic guitar by the campfire." Yeah, this novel is simply a lot of fun. ...more

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Dec 21, 2016 KJ rated it it was amazing

Rounding up from 4-1/2. Really well done story, though parts of it were difficult to read -- I only made it through Book Two on the hopes that the characters' life circumstances would get better. Fortunately, it was more than worth it. ...more

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Feb 03, 2016 Suzanne Moses rated it liked it

What did I think? I don't know yet. It didn't really work for me, but I can't put a finger on any reason why. I'm going to have to process it for a while. ...more

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