A Psalm for the Wild-Built

This book is a total delight. It is the second I've read of this author and has what I imagine is her characteristic quirkiness coupled with a deeply optimistic humanity.

The setting is a far post-robot future. The robots did not take over the world but have left to live their own lives and the humans have them only as a distant history.

Sibling Dex is a Tea Monk who travels around nearby towns and sets up shop, listening to people's troubles and blending them soothing tea. Dex has no gender - Sibling replaces Brother or Sister. Dex is restless and decides to travel to a distant pilgrimage shrine that might no longer exist. Somewhere along the abandoned road a robot approaches and says, 'What do you need?'

And so begins an unexpected friendship. The genderless human and the robot who sees itself as an 'it'. Without any socially constructed identities and in an abandoned shrine the troubled Dex learns to listen to himself and find inner peace. The monk learns meaning in life from the robot and the robot's first question, 'What do you need?' is not so strange after all.