A review by 1librarianspath
All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders

3.0

I feel like this had the idea/premise to be a pretty good book, and the writing isn’t bad, but it just fell short of being something pretty good. It was a nice read, but the storyline felt loose at times. It almost felt like it changed it’s mind about what it wanted to be a few times. I appreciated the diversity and the world creation, but that also felt confused at times. Trying to portray using the correct pronouns felt like the author was annoyed about people not being clearly identifiable, and yet I feel that’s almost definitely not the case due to the range of characters used in various situations (it just came across that way in one scene: ‘the person of unknown gender, whose name rather unhelpfully was Taylor’). I wish it had felt more focused, because I really enjoyed the friendship line, the search for meaning within one’s self, one’s life, and for the world, and the use of magic and science. Anyway, here are two of my favourite quotes from the book:

- No matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be something you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were

- He was too tired to make himself worry about things that didn’t already worry him on their own