All the Birds in the Sky
As seen:
By Charlie Jane Anders
avg rating
2 reviews
WINNER OF BEST NOVEL IN 2016 NEBULA AWARDSFINALIST FOR BEST NOVEL IN THE 2017 HUGO AWARDSPatricia is a witch who can communicate with animals. Laurence is a mad scientist and inventor of the two-second time machine. As teenagers they gravitate towards one another, sharing in the horrors of growing up weird, but their lives take different paths…When they meet again as adults, Laurence is an engineering genius trying to save the world-and live up to his reputation-in near-future San Francisco. Meanwhile, Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the magically gifted, working hard to prove herself to her fellow magicians and secretly repair the earth’s ever growing ailments.As they attempt to save our future, Laurence and Patricia’s shared past pulls them back together. And though they come from different worlds, when they collide, the witch and the scientist will discover that maybe they understand each other better than anyone.
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left me bereft at not being able to talk to the animals in my world. Patricia is a fantastic character and if I could be a witch like her- I would want that skill to be mine.
It is a funny and uplifting story with a lovely ending.
I would highly recommend it for any young person who likes a fantasy to read that will leave them with a longing for the powers they are reading about.
Total escapism from beginning to end.
Almost all the book group finished this book even though many in the group felt that the book meandered around a lot. Many of those who got to the end felt that it fell a little flat and weren't impressed with it. We are wondering if there will be another book and this will become a series given the openness of the ending.
We all felt that this book was a lot of different genres all mixed together making it tricky to decide what kind of book you were reading. This made it difficult to decide how to read it because we weren't sure what was going to happen next. We felt that maybe the author needed the courage to pick just one genre and stick to it rather than stuff all her ideas into the one book.
We weren't entirely sure when this book was set, we felt it might be in our very near future but in a slightly different time line to ours as they were going through the beginnings of an apocalypse and we don't think that's what we're going through at the moment. They had some technology which felt similar to ours such as the caddy, but it wasn't quite the same as things we have.
There were a lot of interesting characters within this book but they were unfortunately not looked at very closely, we all wanted to hear more from a lot of the background characters. Maybe this would have fleshed out one of the story lines a little more.
Overall we gave this book 6 out of 10.
