Member Reviews

This wasn't great.

The social commentary on genocide wasn't well done at all, and with everything going on in a the world, this book really doesn't add anything positive. I found the characters very boring and bland. The writing felt very meh and the story itself just didn't do anything. My main problem with this book was the commentary. It is sci-fi but doesn't really add anything fresh. There's some mind-related powers and power dynamics, but I felt like this book could do with a whole lot of editing, and improvement on the topics discussed. I believe this is a newer edition of the original published book from 2013, so I don't know if it has been changed or not.

Overall, not for me.

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Refugee stories necessarily feel allegorical at the moment, though Karen Lord's loose-limbed novel does alien itself enough to make direct parallels with current world situations difficult. A haughty and elite world is destroyed and all that is left of their people and culture is a pre-existing diaspora and a few wandering spaceships. They take to another world peopled by other humans who are distantly related to them, but with a very different culture and set of skills (in particular psychic skills) and try to fit in, but also preserve a space for their own culture. The fact they are quite elitist and condescending doesn't help.

I found The Best Of All Possible Worlds tricky, I appreciated the concept, and Lord sets about her storytelling with what ends up feeling like a bunch of short stories. They all have the same central characters, and the relationships develop throughout, but outside each chapter - or story - there didn't seem to be much narrative cohesion. It does start to pull together near the end, and turns into a sort of romance, as well as a cooler discussion of the survival of a nation. It is one of those books where I feel the problem was at least half me, it required possibly a bit more work than I had to put into it, for example, I found the character names and designations a little slippery which is not usually a problem. A lot is going on here, with some great ideas, not least a larger cosmological picture that includes Earth in a group of human societies shunned because it is too volatile. But I couldn't really get it to work for me.

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A slower paced, episodic sci-fi that explores the space to grow and heal after a tragedy. Somehow both intimate and sweeping, it truly lives or dies on the strength of the two main characters and their relationship. Given proper time to develop and sweeten, it's a wonderful exploration of friendship, trust, and a love built brick by brick.

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