All the Birds in the Sky

Every year, I hit a book that I really struggle to review and as a result, my reviews taper off. It's still early, but I'm pretty sure that All the Birds in the Sky is that book for 2017. To quote a friend, it's just really less than the sum of its parts, and that makes it really hard to discuss.

The first part was truly brilliant: a boy builds a two second time machine (only forwards, not backwards, of course) and a girl discovers that she can talk to birds and together they fight crime commiserate about being stuck in the wrong genre. In this part, the magical elements are so small, and brought into contrast with larger than life reality – super strict parents, super out-of-touch teachers, a guidance counselor/assassin – and together it's just really a special conversation about what it is that we're discussing when we write and read and reread coming of age teen magician books. I loved that they weren't like each other, but they clung to each other because neither of them was like anyone else. In a lot of key ways, it reminded me of my own relationship with my own best friend.

I liked the decision to skip over both of them coming into their own and go right to them as independent young adults. I thought it was brave to leave out any details of the Special Secret School for Witches. The tone of the next part lost some of the contrast of small magic/big life/quirky offshoots that are funny but not overpowering, but it was still riding on the strength of the beginning. Some of the ideas introduced were really clever (like the guy who turns into nature once he leaves his bookshop) and others fell a little flat for me (like the way witches were totally obsessed with not becoming too arrogant), but overall, I really liked the central tension between saving the world and saving humanity and found that compelling.

Then, holy non-sequitur, Batman! We enter a massive time jump, to stop one month in to have 1.5 pages of Patricia and Lawrence having sex, their social falling out and Lawrence's girlfriend both having been erased during the time jump. But no sooner do we turn the page, then there's another several months of time jump. If you have to stop your time jump in the middle to show your readers coitus, you're doing something wrong. But I probably should have just walked away, because after this, I felt that the characterization completely fell apart and a lot of the storytelling hinged on deus ex machinae and false dilemmas.

So, strong start, I'd like to see Anders' next work, but I probably won't reread this; at least not all of the way through.