Matthew Groves

Overall, this is a decent conclusion to the trilogy. There's a lot of good pieces here, but I felt like his plot development and internal logic fell apart a little bit down the stretch.

Spoilers

Pros:
I thought Yomen was a good addition to the landscape. He has a nice moral shade of gray, which adds to the unexpectedly charitable view of the Lord Ruler. He's also really smart, and tricks Vin and Elend a few times in compelling, thoughtful ways (so does Beldre to Spook, on a slightly smaller level).

I had some negative thoughts about the Ruin/Preservation dynamic here, but I did think it was a clever addition that Vin/Elend's drive to find the atium was orchestrated by Ruin in the first place.

I thought the overall treatment of religion was pretty good - Sanderson is a devout Mormon - in the sense that he fairly portrayed someone's time of deconstruction/doubt.
And as I mentioned in the last review, I thought the foreshadowing of Sazed being the Hero - both with the gender-neutral pronouns, but especially the rest of the prophecies like the “world on his arms” line - was a strong ending note. That line weaved together well, with all the Keepers' knowledge being used to let him properly fix the world.

Cons:
Over the course of the trilogy, his writing bothered me more and more. The common writing expression is “show, don't tell” the audience about a character. I felt like this book spends a LOT of time verbatim describing a character's internal thoughts, which is often much less interesting than watching their actions. Writing that way DOES mean that your character actions and motives have to be discernible without knowing their inner thoughts, which is a high burden to put on your plot and character development. Speaking of that...

It was a bit hard to read after experiencing the depth of plotlines and character development of Game of Thrones; feels much more cartoonish in its plot than it did when I read it 5 years ago. The plot developments in books 2-3 felt a little arbitrary in the grand scheme; I felt like 1 was a fun book and a great idea; I think 2 and 3 are still pretty fun, but the grand finale doesn't necessarily feel like it pulls the great idea together. A few questions: why is Ruin's body made of atium? Why did Vin exactly decided that trying to die would be the responsible decision? With all the Ruin/Preservation stuff in the last bit, what's the real difference in their power and consciousness, and why do they need bodies? The “power flowing” language felt pretty hokey after he did such a good job making an internally consistent and exciting magic system in Allomancy, etc. All that felt like a bad example of Sanderson engineering his plot to a conclusion he wanted (Sazed being the Hero, which I actually thought was a solid conclusion). It just all felt a bit gimmicky, not as tight of a puzzle as expected.

The best plot surprises/conclusions are when you look back and think “I really should have seen it coming.” Sanderson nails some of those: Sazed being the Hero, TenSoon being an imposter, Vin having the earring. But most of the second half of book 3 felt far too deus ex machina, instead of relying on the internal narrative.

Although she treats God a bit too anthropomorphically for my theology at times, KA has done an incredibly thorough reading of Genesis here and presented it in a very accessible format. It's a slim little commentary that reads more like Sparknotes than footnotes. You'll consider the stories of the patriarchs in new ways and learn something about at least one of the characters in Genesis that you hadn't seen before. A great read for anyone seeking more insights into some of the most influential/important stories in Christianity (or Judaism and Islam, for that matter)

Pros: everything good about the first book returns. It still handles apocalyptic topics in serious ways like The Stand and perhaps even The Road; it still handles grief in a way that's not only “good for fantasy,” but simply “great for fiction.” Jemisin remains the most thoughtful, insightful writer on emotional trauma I've read since The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I also appreciated the daughter's viewpoint, giving another shade of gray to the moral spectrum of the world.

Cons: the pacing felt slightly off to me; took me a while to get through the first third, then I read the second half at a sprint

Pros: more incorporation of nature imagery and themes than I remembered.
This is the kind of thing that I think is fun, and that more authors should do: short stories / novellas set in their world that give the advantages of exploring a little bit more or answering reader questions without getting caught up in the weight of a full new plot.
There are a few moments of magic and beauty that I'm sure are what he was going for, in the vein of Name of the Wind.

Cons: While I loved these books in high school and there's a bit of a nostalgia factor, I'm a different reader now. I find his writing and especially his dialogue so very stilted that it definitely takes me out of the world and the plot. And the breadth of other things I've read make it harder to recommend this series, when I now have so many other works that are more interesting and have a shorter page count. But I'll always be grateful to CP for making my younger self dream about books and writing.

Laudato Si isn't the only reason I became a Catholic, but it's a big one. As someone who has worked as a climate activist and read a lot in the genre, for my money this is the best thing anyone's written about the climate crisis and its underlying problems.

As a teacher, I'm supposed to affirm “don't teach them what to think, teach them how to think.” But in this case... just about every line is what I hope everyone will come to think about the climate crisis and our way forward. Francis pulls on the rich history of Catholic Social Teaching and Liberation Theology, his own experience growing up in the Global South (he's Argentinian), and delivers a profound critique of the Western individualistic, consumeristic mindset.

It's also fairly short (~100 pages) and is pretty accessible. Highly, highly recommended.

Binti is very creative and thoughtful, but it also annoyed me and I wish I only ready the first novella instead of the full trilogy.

Pros:

I really like Nnedi Okorafor as a person. I first heard her talking about sci-fi and imagination with Br. Guy Consolmagno (the Vatican's top astronomer), and her vision and creativity struck me. Those attributes show in Binti abundantly: the wildly different alien species, the technology and travel, it's all a brilliant kaleidoscope of ideas. It's very easy to cheer for the protagonist. The Binti trilogy is also very thoughtful about the complexities of interactions between different species and human prejudice. I read these novellas because I'm trying to stretch myself a bit, and these definitely fit the bill.


Cons:

As is perhaps inevitable with trying to stretch myself with new material (my cultural background is wildly different from the Nigerian-American Ms. Okorafor), I found Binti to be SUPER weird. A character genetically fuses with other species/races not once, not twice, but three times during the plot. There are a LOT of features about this future world that are not explained at all and are just accepted in passing; some of these are fine and comprehensible, like a type of meditation they call “treeing.” But characters can apparently summon electric currents by thinking really hard about math equations, talk to animals, and all sorts of other oddities. Ideally, a reader would be so enchanted by the story that these would be trivial details that you accept in stride, but I was never quite “into” the story enough to avoid being irked every time one of them popped up.

The author also had a habit of writing oddly clipped sentences sometimes that drove me nuts.

I usually give pros and cons for books, but that somehow feels inappropriate, or insufficient, for this. (Although I will say that, perhaps because Coates has a poetry background, much of the writing is smooth and pretty).

This doesn't feel like a book for me to critique, because 1) we come from very different social locations, and 2) it's so personal that critiquing the book on any serious level would simply be critiquing his life experience. Coates is writing a letter to his 15-year-old son about his upbringing and current life as a black man in America. This isn't merely a framing device, it really does read as an intimate diary, the kind of thing you write to your child in case you die, so they will have some guiding life advice from you.

Note: the purpose of this book isn't to “convince” you that America's systems often discriminate against black people. This book isn't an argument, it's a memento. If that's what you're looking for, perhaps try “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander or “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson as starting points.

Pros: describes space travel in a compelling, adventurous way; solid crafting of another world; the closing segment when CS Lewis provides his translation of human nature.

Cons: although I like CS Lewis a lot, I've always thought his dialogue was a little stuffy; never really “takes off;” I didn't quite grasp all the pieces he was trying to pull together from sci-fi, Christian mythology, and his own new ideas.

On the whole, there's a lot of books to read in this world, and I was unconvinced to finish the trilogy.

You don't read Silence and decide what you think about the book; you read Silence and decide what you think about life.

What are my deepest convictions?
What would it take for me to publicly denounce them? If you say “nothing” could make me denounce them, have you realllllly thought that through?
What do I think about suffering, and about how God acts in the world, and about the purpose of Jesus coming to the world?

Along with Dostoevsky's “Brothers Karamazov” and Russell's “The Sparrow,” and of course the Biblical book of Job, Endo's “Silence” stands as an all-time great meditation on suffering.

The film by Scorsese is also excellent but, just like the novel, it's a lot to take in.

Laurus was awe-inspiring. It's generally about a wandering hermit / monk / holy man named Arseny in medieval Russia who travels on a long and weary route throughout eastern Europe and the Holy Lands on a sort of exhilarating, fraught pilgrimage. Along the way it explores piety, suffering and death, sanctification, penance, the nature of time passing, and redemption. It feels like a strange but wonderful blend of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and stories of St. Francis of Assisi, Cold Mountain / the Iliad, the Brendan Gleeson movie “Calvary,” the Avett Brothers song “The Fire,” South American magical realism literature, and the Brothers Karamazov. A very wide-ranging and impressive lot!

While I would give a few technical qualms about Arseny's personal theology of justification and salvation, the deeper themes of humility and suffering are beautiful and wise. One of my favorite eastern church fathers, and Dostoevsky's favorite, is St. Isaac the Syrian. His most famous passage emphasizes how the Christian must have “a merciful heart ... burning for the sake of all creation... from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up prayers with tears continually for all of creation.” Dostoevsky phrases this as “watering the earth with your tears.” Arseny isn't neglectful of those suffering - he uses his medical knowledge and faith to heal all day long - but he also knows that death comes for us all and it's silly to imagine we can avoid it. But still, his heart breaks every time he loses someone. A nun observes that, “During the day, God's Servant Arseny laughs at the world. At nights he mourns the same world.” His vulnerability with everyone he meets is part of what the people love about him, and this vulnerability comes from his renunciation of possessions and relationships, partly because of his suffering in them. In Laurus, renunciation isn't about avoiding the world and its emotions, but about entering them more deeply alongside people. His radical generosity often feels like it belongs in a Gospel story that got cut from the New Testament, and his hospitality with dangerous strangers and nature feel like a tale from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Talking about Dostoevsky one time, Archbishop Rowan Williams reflected on suffering in a way that fits this story well: “Suffering confers a certain authority. We learn from it. Dostoevsky is often accused of masochism. But he's not saying suffering is good for you. He's saying suffering is how you are likely to learn. Don't be frightened when it happens to you.” I recently read “Hannah Coulter” by Wendell Berry, and it prompted me to consider the fruits of taking a vow of stability like some monks still do, and what's missing from the modern world when very few people's lives have any form of stability. In a similar vein, I think Laurus really shows how a vow of poverty can open us up to loving more widely and deeply, and how our material things keep us from living in right relationship with others and God.


In a way that I'm not really cut out to describe, the world of Arseny is also mystical and alive with wonder and meaning, “enchanted” in a sense. More than any theological treatise I've ever read, this has made me curious about the Eastern Orthodox tradition. One Orthodox reviewer wrote, “Most Americans who read Laurus will take it as a work with a strong current of magical realism; the handful of us American readers who worship in the Eastern Christian tradition will recognize it as simply Orthodoxy, where the border between wonder-working and everyday life is porous.” I don't know much about Orthodoxy, but I know scripture says “You shall judge them by their fruits” (Matt ch7); if books like Laurus are the fruits of Orthodoxy, then it sure has a lot to offer today's hyper-materialistic, reductionist modern world. This interaction between faith, miracles, and the natural world pops up over and over again. When Arseny heals someone, a nun asks herself, “‘Is this the result of our brother Arseny's therapeutic measures or the Lord's miracle, appearing independently of human action?' Essentially, the abbess answers herself: ‘one does not contradict the other, for a miracle can be the result of effort multiplied by faith.'” This reminds me of an excellent passage from Terry Pratchett in Small Gods about how “just because you can explain something, that doesn't make it stop being a miracle.” It also touches a bit on something Aquinas is a big fan of, how grace doesn't contradict nature, but rather perfects it (Q1.8).


I also learned a lot about a part of world history that I didn't know much about, and enjoyed filling in that part of the map and timeline in my mind. (Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman have also helped in this area recently.) The author has a few fascinating interviews online where he discusses how the concept of the Middle Ages doesn't apply to Russia in the same way it does in Western Europe, because one of the primary historical touchstones for Russia doesn't happen until the Christianization of the region in 988 leads to a unification of many smaller groups into one larger Russian state (of course there are a million intricacies here, especially with modern politics, disclaimers, etc). But it's fascinating how the story that the farther eastern stretches of Europe tells itself is much different than what Western Europe tells itself... in the West our histories often gloss over the millennium between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Enlightenment, but that's of course a mistake and a type of historical malpractice. I've greatly enjoyed the imagination and landscape of the Russian novels I've read in recent years (Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, the Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy, and in a more trivial way even the Shadow and Bone books, whose author is of Russian-Jewish descent), and Laurus helped paint a more rich picture of the backdrop for the whole region's sense of identity and heritage.

The book also used a strange mix of Old English and modern language, which worked well since part of the book is about how the passage of time feels so elusive, and we experience the flow of time strangely at different moments of our lives and faith journeys. Several times Arseny experiences multiple overlapping moments in time all at once, and they're beautiful prose.

One last thing, which really stuck with me. In all of his wanderings, Arseny sometimes has a great sense of purpose, but in the first half he mostly just seems to be blundering forward in some combination of restlessness and guilt. At this point he has an interaction with an older monk that I loved. Arseny has just asked the monk for a sign that he is going in the right general direction: “‘But is not Christ a general direction?' asked the elder. ‘What other kind of direction do you seek? And how do you even understand the journey anyway? As the vast expanses you left behind? You made it here with your questions, though you could have asked them in your local monastery. I am not saying wandering is useless: there is a point to it. But do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great] who had a journey but had no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.'
‘Then what should I be enamored of?' asked Arseny.
‘Vertical motion,' answered the elder, pointing above.” This distinction between horizontal motion and vertical motion strikes me as a brilliant comparison for our age, where so many people and systems are trudging forward without a broader eye to where certain trends are carrying society. We have spent a lot of technological brilliance in recent decades answering “how do we do __” questions, but not a lot of asking where that will take us or if we should pursue it. Lots of modern life, with lurches forward, sometimes feels telos-less. Maybe Arseny and the Orthodox have found a better telos than the rest of us.

Like “Once Upon a Time in the North” and “La Belle Sauvage,” the Collectors is a great little addition to the world of His Dark Materials. Elsewhere Pullman has called these little tidbits “lantern slides” and I think that's about right.

I haven't read the new one yet, about adult Lyra, but I think the approach in these is better: an interesting tangent, or a fleshing-out of the world, instead of a direct sequel. Sequels are tough because you're unwrapping the tidy bow you wrapped up last time, and re-introducing new stakes and something new about your character. But who doesn't want to hear about Lee Scorseby and Iorek fighting back in the good old days for 100 pages? Or how Ms. Coulter's haunting effect on powerful men lasts long after she's left them behind? This is the way to expand a universe. Think of it as the “Beedle the Bard” approach as opposed to the “Cursed Child,” or perhaps HBO's Watchmen show. If you liked the Golden Compass trilogy, a Bill Nighy narration of this short story is a no-brainer.

PS: yes of course I wish he hated religion less, and I'd be glad to talk about it if you want to. Look up his interview with Rowan Williams, a leading Anglican theologian, for a worthwhile conversation about this

I had a great time with Six of Crows. Like many people, I thought it was the most fun of the Shadow and Bone books, and I would recommend it to anyone. Reading the original trilogy is recommended but not required, and it could be a standalone “heist story” even if you didn't really like the originals. It feels a bit like Oceans Eleven or the first Mistborn with a solidly character-driven plot.

I really appreciated the variety and depth of the characters. From reading the original trilogy you have a few conceptions/stereotypes about the various peoples, but this feels like a fully cosmopolitan book, which is fitting for its trader city setting. I also appreciate/respect that she wasn't just showing off different in-world cultures for the sake of vague “worldbuilding,” but that the characters' backgrounds strongly shape their motives. She shows two different characters who are earnestly but not cartoonishly patriotic for their own countries, and I thought their Romeo/Juliet dynamic was very good and a strong step up from most YA.

Different characters have different things to bond over or fight about, and it truly drives the plot and their motives. Having tension within the group AND against other groups (inter-and intra-) makes all of the decisions matter and truly kept me guessing; I had no idea what would happen. There were lots of little twists, and a few really good ones.

Have fun!

The Traitor is the kind of book that's best if you know nothing going in. So I'll simply say: its character arcs, complex political intrigue, and scorching take on colonialism's corrupting power make it one of my books of the year. Don't read any spoilers below (and especially not the short story), go read it now.





SPOILERS:

The Traitor does a lot really well. First, it's rare to see a story progress and realize that its being told from the villain's perspective. Not a “conflicted hero” (Harry's struggles with his Voldemort impulses), or an “anti-hero” (Clint Eastwood), it's an unfiltered villain and you don't realize it until the end. It's like reading a book told from the perspective of Walder Frey and the finale is his victorious Red Wedding. It's the mark of a great plot twist that it feels completely surprising and brutal in the moment, but completely inevitable on a second read (Lyxaxu's attack feels so out-of-the-blue at first, but then later you think “ahhh of course he's the one who would have figured it out”). All the best twists feel in-character, and that, when you really stop to think about it, nothing else could have reasonably happened. This feels like that.

I really appreciated having no idea of what would happen; I respect Dickinson enough to think there's no “plot armor” and that Baru really could just get assassinated and die at any point, or that she could win the rebellion and rule with her lover, or take a political marriage, or still be an Imperial agent. Right up until the end I felt like it could have gone in any direction, and that's a great accomplishment as a storyteller.

It's also great to see thoughtful, complex political turmoil. Too often fantasy-inspired fiction has really bad politics, where the characters feel like paper cutouts and there's zero intrigue or depth in the political mechanisms (like Sanderson's writing in the Stormlight Archive, which I otherwise enjoy a good amount). This instead feels like real political turmoil, where each character has deep and well-understood motives that drive all their actions (closer to Game of Thrones). When characters scheme in The Traitor, you see what they're doing and why they act that way. The web of connections and rivalries between the dukes/duchesses feels like the inheritance of decades of squabbling, just as it should. Stephen King once said something like “I don't want the reader to feel like if they took a wrong turn, they'd come out a side door and be off set. I want them to feel like every nook and cranny has some unnamed character's whole world hidden behind it.” The Traitor feels like this.

Baru's character arc is great, just a trainwreck of watching someone slowly throw away everything they hold dear. This underlines a really thoughtful critique of empire and colonialism, and eugenics (reminds me of Fifth Season in that way).

I also thoroughly enjoyed the repeated tie-in of the examples of how the empire deals with its political prisoners: let them escape so thoroughly that they think “they'd never let me get this far” and THEN re-capture them. That's exactly what the empire did with the rebellion, and the connections with individual prisoners and the cult “honeypots” drives home the message well. When you're fighting the empire, they're all Fools Rebellions.

I picked this up because it's popular amongst my students, and I was pleasantly surprised by most of it. The book has several good twists and throws together elements of cat-and-mouse ship chases (like Master and Commander), space horror (Sunshine, Alien), and even a dash of zombie-like survival adrenaline (28 Days Later, World War Z). There's also a good decision to make the ship's AI its own, thoughtful character, and I thought the authors handled machine decision-making very well. There's also a gorgeous, thoughtful approach to the visual design process, with some of the most creative mixture of text and graphics I've ever come across. There's a lot to like here.

It's also primarily aimed at high schoolers, so the teen romance and some of the tone is very YA, but fair enough.

Pros: splitting the characters up into their own interweaving arcs is good to learn a lot more about them; finally seeing all the different characters on the board at once is fun and feels like an appropriate payoff for the size of series and how far we are into it; still more smart than most fun books and more fun than most smart books (I.e. the politics have a lot of reasonable depth in them and the scenarios feel quite realistic in how people and people groups react to things); Naomi's backstory in particular adds a lot of depth to her since she didn't really have any apparent flaws

Cons: a whole book without the most interesting part of the series (what do we do when we face an alien thing and have no clue what it is or how to interact with it safely?); we're jussssst starting to stretch the credulity of “wait, is every main character linked somehow to every important person in the galaxy?”

A terrific, slim book that's very readable. Some great emphases on rejecting worldly/secular definitions of success, in favor of Christ's vision for intimacy, vulnerability, and self-sacrifice. I also really agreed with his view that the church can't be partitioned: that you can't just have more therapists and social workers and think they've replaced the church (although of course we do need more of them).

Some favorites:

“Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations.”

“Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time, there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, isolation, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness full the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.”

VE Schwab comes highly recommended, and she even attended the school where I teach!

Pros: This book was fun, had some unique wrinkles and a lot of style, and I plan to read the trilogy. In today's world where Marvel and everyone else has stumbled onto the idea of a multiverse and doesn't really know what to do with it, having only 4 Londons felt like a good number to me. It kept a decently manageable scope, while also giving space for vividly different worlds to explore.

Cons: I'm not someone who's desperate for an encyclopedia describing how every magical interaction works, but one of the rules of fantasy that I think shouldn't be broken amounts to this: you can only use magic to solve a plot problem if the audience understands the limits of what that magic can do. A few places in the plot here, the magic's open-ended sense of possibility felt merely arbitrary, which robs some of the story's drama and resolutions of their proper weight and makes the magic feel more like a deus ex machina.

McKenzie seems like a thoughtful, pastoral guy, and he makes the smart decision to say “here are a few different perspectives” on the controversial bits (mostly). Good introduction to the sacraments. Makes a good case that the “via media” of the Anglican tradition is the right balance between Catholicism and the Protestants.

This book reminds me that stories are really the result of lots of different things going right. Nightingale does some things well, but more things not so well

Pros: I thought the “tale of two sisters” frame was solid, and the stay-at-home sister's encounters with the “nice” German officer were handled well. The ending had an emotional depth

Cons: the rest of the story felt pretty cliche to me, especially the constant emphasis on the younger sister's beauty. A lot of the dialogue felt really flat/wooden/clunky to me, as well as some of the prose.

It's also a little unfair, since I read this a few months after finishing All The Light We Cannot See, which occupies a very similar “WW2 tale with 2 split protagonists and some time shifts,” but was better at almost everything and was beautiful to boot. Read that, and then read Atonement, and then read Nightingale if you love the genre and can't get enough

In all fairness, Pat lays out in both the introduction and the afterword that this book isn't for everyone and is unlike his others. I think the best way to put it for me is that this book's ratio of “pretty:plot” is too far for me. I like pretty books (both “All the Light We Cannot See” and “The Night Circus” are certainly pretty books), but I need a little more of a plotline. If that's not you, you'll probably really like this.

Pros: just as pretty, stylish, and dramatic as the first one, but perhaps even a bit more fun (the tournament is a blast). Reminds me of how aesthetically pleasing the Night Circus is. I also really appreciated the relationship between the brothers; they're not rivals, or power beholden to each other like lots of fantasy would have. They really love each other, and it gives the whole book a warm-hearted twinge that drives it all.

Cons: a little bit of a bait and switch from the last book's finale, but I do sympathize that it's hard to have a plot with high stakes in book 2 of 3 (you need it to have its own problems but still tie in well with the other two). Schwab solved this with a blatant cliffhanger, which I don't love, but who am I to judge

Pros: Usually, the more you know about the underlying science, the less believable/engrossing a sci-fi book is. Three-Body Problem is that rare sci-fi book that is better if you know more of the science it engages with. As a physics guy, I loved that. It's also really clever in employing science concepts as plot devices; from the famous three-body problem you see early on, to the use of non-digital computing, to nano technology, everything feels authentic. Also, from my own experience in the sciences, I thought the way that Earth scientists dealt with anomalies was handled in exactly the right way. Also, the author's afterward is excellent.

Cons: pretty technical at times; I was a physics major and still had to Google a few things. Because it's translated, it's also a little clunky in places. Together, these can make a few chapters drag on a bit.

If Just Mercy doesn't break your heart and convince you that our criminal justice system needs reforming, I don't know if anything ever will. Stevenson is a lawyer with a non-profit giving people legal help, and he gives dozens and dozens of similar stories that show our broken system: a young teenager, often Black, will commit a stupid crime, often unstable from their abuse in foster care; the prosecutor will succeed in illegally securing an all-white jury; the kid's court-appointed lawyer will be incompetent or wildly underpaid, causing them to completely mishandle the case and provide no adequate defense; the kid is sentenced to death before they've even gone to high school, and they spend decades in prison in terrible, abusive conditions. It feels like a depressing chain of dominoes, and at every step you think “Surely someone will step in and make this right,” but it doesn't happen.

As a Christian I was already disposed against the death penalty because the Gospel teaches us that no person is beyond redemption, but this book has further solidified my view. So many of the convictions may have been unjust for one reason or another, and even one innocent execution is one too many. And more generally, I really agreed with one thing Stevenson said: “The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit... [It's about] Do we deserve to kill?” I think not.

Building from that, he talks very compellingly about how faith informs his work, especially in a chapter near the end about how all people share the same brokenness. It's great stuff, and everyone should read it.

2021 re-read update: When my grandkids ask me about COVID-19, I think the first thing I'll tell them is that I read Station Eleven in December 2019, and it 100% freaked me out. I'm not sure how many people read this in the months before our actual outbreak, but it's a special kind of surreal to read a richly imagined book about a respiratory virus from central Asia killing the world, and then watch it happen in real time. I understand if few people want to read it until long after COVID has passed, but I found a second read highlighted everything I enjoyed about it the first time: the beauty of her prose, the haunting nature of the scenery, the kaleidoscope of characters interacting and piecing together, and the centrality of the important things in life: survival is insufficient. In a strange way, I also found it comforting in COVID, and it strengthened my resolve on the hard days of quarantine/distancing life, knowing just how much worse it easily could have been. Everyone should read it, but maybe not RIGHT before a global pandemic.

Original review from 2019:

I loved Station Eleven. I somehow didn't realize that the central premise is a post-disaster story (which is revealed very early), so the book's setting up of the societal collapse hit me harder than for most people. (It does also go to show you how we shouldn't pigeonhole books by genre, and instead let them surprise us). A lot of familiar elements are there, from films like Contagion describing a medical outbreak, or grim survival like The Road, or both like The Stand. And while it didn't shy away from showing the despair of living through – or dying during – the collapse of civilization, I appreciated that this wasn't the main tone. The book's motto is “survival is insufficient,” so it felt appropriate that the book feels more melancholy and wistful (and occasionally generous and warm) than just bleak. The main characters are all performers, so the focus is on making the world worth living in through their art.

Structurally, the plot points also tie neatly together, like a quilt where all the patches match up just right. It sometimes feels like an I Spy, where you see connections between characters separated by decades and continents. Flashbacks and key items all feel intertwined, without feeling too contrived.

I also liked her writing, with its beautiful, flowing long sentences. There's a chapter late in All The Light We Cannot See that's composed of a montage of long sentences, and Emily Mandel reminded me of that a bit. It's the first book in a while I've sprinted through, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I highly recommend it.

Riveting, twisty without feeling unfairly manipulative, dark, and often very intelligent.

Side rant: Hollywood gives us lots of perfect marriages, and lots of terrible ones that implode, but it would be really nice to see more of the role model marriages we really need: couple hits hard times, they have problems and disagreements but communicate well and work through it, and they both choose to stick it out and see the value in commitment.