Diggs Welden’s Reviews > A Psalm for the Wild-Built > Status Update

When sibling Dex and the robot hold hands, I think there is at least some intimate feelings behind this interaction. This is demonstrated on page 122, where the author writes, “Mosscap's fingertips made their skin glow red.” Red is known as the color of love, and when I think of two beings holding hands, creating a red glow, I think they must be in love.

On page 111, the author writes, “The bulk of what they found was anger, consistently doubling itself like cells dividing.” I found it very interesting how the author uses cell division as a way to describe both the robot and Dex’s feelings. This is because cells are such a symbol of living organism so why does this connect to the robot?

Nothing in this book relies on gas or oil, I think the author makes this clear on purpose by pointing out all the electric and solar-powered gadgets. On page 45, the author writes, “black asphalt an oil road, made for oil motors and oil tires and oil fabric and oil frames.” This shows how much the people of Panga changed by emphasizing the drastic shift in how they treat the plant before vs after the transition age.

Throughout the book, the author adds many details that show the people of Panga are much kinder and happier than people on Earth today. One example of this is on page 31 when the author writes, “Silencing the chorus of alerts. Dex laughed, and the crowd laughed, and Dex waved them over.” This is interesting because if this happened on Earth, people would be annoyed and mad about the notification's inconvenience.

Something that jumped out to me right away was how tea is used in this book, much like it is in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. On page 12, the author explains how a tea monk has the job of listening to people's problems and giving them tea. It is interesting to me that two totally different authors of two totally different books both decide to use tea as a way spark a conversation between people who have never met.