How High We Go in the Dark

This is one of those very well-written books that was extremely hard for me to get through. I gets compared with Cloud Atlas in the blurb, and that certainly makes sense for the layered structure moving through time (Emily St. John Mandel also comes to mind), but stylistically I think it's a little closer to the short stories of Ted Chiang: deep character development and incredible emotional resonance in 25 pages or less. The through-line of the book is death: how we deal with death while living on a dying planet. A LOT of that death is parents grieving children, which is just not something I'm emotionally up for at this point in my life. It's also a post-COVID plague book (the second or third I've read recently), so those triggers are all there too. Still, I think how affected I felt is a testament to Nagamatsu's writing. It's also nice to have a book that while set all over the world, universe really, often comes back to Japanese characters and settings for a perspective SFF rarely gets.

My only criticism was the last chapter which wrapped things up a little more than I liked in a way that felt a little like we changed subgenres, but this is a minor personal taste thing and I don't think diminishes the work as a whole.

And while it's challenging to read so much about death, I do feel like I came away with a lot to think about. I'd still recommend it if you are okay with the trigger warnings for chronic illness, plague, and child death.