A Prayer for the Crown-Shy: A Monk and Robot Book (Monk & Robot 2)

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I'm the world's biggest fan of odd couple buddy road trips in science fiction, and this odd couple buddy road trip is a delight: funny, thoughtful, touching, sweet, and one of the most humane books I've read in a long time. We could all use a read like this right now.”—Sarah Pinsker And through this theme, Chambers continues to explore what humanity needs. If we have everything we want, how much does having more matter? In A Prayer for the Crown Shy the entire question that Mosscap is struggling with begins to feel like a meta journey for ourselves. To wonder if when we have more access, more ‘things’, more extras, what that means for us? While Sibling Dex teaches Mosscap about their world, it begins to question our own. Yeah, day’s getting late,” Dex agreed. Twenty miles wasn’t so bad, but creamy highway or not, they were still deep in forest and had yet to see anyone else on the road. There was no reason beyond impatience to continue pressing on in the dark, and though Dex was looking forward to being in a proper town again, stillness and rest sounded preferable in the moment.

The only thing I found I didn't like is that it was too short. I felt they was just starting their travels and they were not finished. But it ended rather abruptly. And - while this bit was not something I personally identified with, it felt personal in a way that made me apologize in my head to every non-plant-person I've hiked with and bored with the details of invasive plant ecology, oak identification, and the finer points of distinguishing between congeneric species:A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a story of kindness and love from one of the foremost practitioners of hopeful SF. I've been hoping she will say it again so I can catch her exact words but even with asking her things more often than usual, she hasn't repeated it. There was only one reminder of the giants that had once stood in this forest (and would again, one day). Dex stopped the wagon and hopped off their bike as they approached the village’s namesake: an enormous stump, wide as a modest house, its spiring might cut clean away in the early days of the Factory Age, a time in which not much thought was given to spending twenty minutes on killing something that had taken a thousand years to grow. There was a shrine to Bosh placed before the stump, a stone pedestal with a carved sphere set on top. Small ribbons had been tied to it by countless passersby, their colors faded and fraying in the open air. Dex had ribbon in the wagon but did not fetch it. They merely capped their hand atop the mossy stone, and bowed their head in greeting and reverence.

Materially, yeah, pretty much,” Dex answered, in regards to the wagon. “At least, in an everyday sense.”B&N: Excellent, thank you. So I have to say that you strike quite a tone from the first sentence in A Psalm for the Wild-Built by saying sometimes a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to Get the eff out of the city. As a New Yorker, I get it. I was instantly in Dex’s mindset and fully felt that emotion. It is such a great beginning. Can you just talk to that? These themes are as tenderly explored in this series as everything else. Inside the small economy of a novella, Chambers gives them both weight and weightlessness all at once: they are not so grim or overwhelming that they overshadow the overall charm and playfulness and humor of the story (which is frankly feels-pummelingly good!), but they nonetheless assume a fully weighted presence in the narrative (I love, for example, how the meandering quality of the plot in this book echoes so perfectly the searching lost-ness that the characters feel). Maybe,” Dex said with gentle honesty. “But I highly doubt many of them will feel that way, and anyway, you don’t have to worry about that.” As does a robot. Mosscap discovers that it has no answer for itself to its own question. It doesn’t know – at least not yet – what it needs or what its fellow robots need. I sincerely hope that the series will continue, and that we’ll get to follow Mosscap and Dex as they hunt for their own answers.

Don’t expect big plot or twists. The writing itself manifests its core morality, and in that way proves its own core idea (because it seems too prescriptive to call it a thesis)—it is enough to ask these questions, sometimes. You don’t have to earn catharsis. It can be enough to share with the ones you care about the meditations of the wonders of the world, dwelling on what it means to be alive. These gently profound observations, these personal aches and these intimate joys…if that’s not why we’re here, it’s certainly what matters, on most of our day to days. The heart of the book is the relationship between Dex and Mosscap. Set on the earth-like world of Panga, Dex is a gender-neutral monk whose life felt unsatisfying. They left their role working in the gardens of a monastery in Book 1, ‘A Psalm for the Wild Built’ and started a new vocation as a travelling Tea Monk. As they mastered the art of brewing the perfect blend of tea whilst listening to the concerns of others, they still found a gaping hole in their life that they couldn’t fulfil. Due to their nagging sense of being without a true purpose in life, they decided to travel into the wilderness to find a long-forgotten hermitage. During this journey, they met with Mosscap and agreed to guide it in the human settled areas so that it could ask the human’s: Don’t think of it that way,” Dex said. “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to be you. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you nervous.” Mosscap’s lenses shifted, and Dex could hear a small whir inside its head. “I’d never thought of it that way,” Mosscap said. It put its hands flat against its torso, falling silent and serious.B&N: Now we are a book company. So I just have to ask, of course, what are you reading? or what have you read? What are some of your favorite books? One day last week Alexa caught me off guard with something like, "Thank you for always being so appreciative. You make this AI very happy". This novella is gentle, hopeful, and fundamentally queer in how it conceives of care and family. Accessible and propulsive, it’s a sort of modern parable for anyone who feels somewhat adrift, even when they’re not sure they should. I’m so pleased that this is the first of a series, and that there will be more of this world, because, wow, do I want more of it. This book is the type of reading experience I’d recommend to anyone having a hard time, which might be a lot of people at this point... it’s a comforting story about comfort and care, as soothing to read as it is to think about, and so full of hope and wonder and potential discovery. I hope you’ll try it.” — Smart Bitches, Trashy Books