Jun 29

Jun 29 All the Birds in the Sky

Author: Charlie Jane Anders
Publisher: Tor
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Childhood friends Patricia Delfine, a witch, and Laurence Armstead, a mad scientist, parted ways under mysterious circumstances during middle school. But as adults they both wind up in near-future San Francisco, where Laurence is an engineering genius and Patricia works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world’s ever growing ailments. But something is determined to bring them back together—to either save the world, or end it.

TL;DR Review

All the Birds in the Sky is a whimsical, super creative novel with some really lovable characters. I loved how it blended fantasy and sci-fi. A new favorite!

For you if: You love a great storyteller voice.

Full Review

“A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.”

I read All the Birds in the Sky because I got it in my Page 1 Books subscription — their booksellers chose it just for me, based on my reading history. I’d also previously read The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders and wanted to read more of her novels. So voila, here was the answer. And y’all — it was literally so good.

I love a whimsical, creative book, and this had just the right touch of both. It combines low fantasy and soft sci-fi in a recognizable world, coming together as a funny, moving, engaging, and just plain fun book to read. It’s about two main characters: Patricia, who is apparently a witch (or so a giant tree told her one time), and Laurence (never Larry), who is a boy computer genius. They’re bullied throughout middle school, but have each other — until they don’t. Then they reconnect later, as adults, when the world seems to be ending. But their respective groups of people have competing ideas about what to do in response.

The pacing was a little slow in the middle (honestly, that’s true for most books), but I loved Patricia and Laurence so much that I was more than willing to spend the time with them. Neither of them is perfect, but I loved them together and their beautiful, tested, gritty friendship. Can we please have more magic + science books??

All in all, I really just loved it. I definitely want to read it again someday. And Charlie Jane Anders has become an auto-read author for me.