“The someone was a woman carrying a workbag and looking like she…”

I'm currently behind on reviews, so don't be surprised if the recent reviews are a bit sparse.

The someone was a woman carrying a workbag and looking like she hadn’t slept. “My cat died last night,” she said, right before bursting into tears.
Dex realized with a stomach-souring thud that they were standing on the wrong side of the vast gulf between having read about doing a thing and doing the thing.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

by Becky Chambers · published 2021 · read 2023-01-23

★★★☆☆

After not getting on too well with Wayfarers (I liked it, but too fluffy, no desire to go back), this book worked much better for me. Some of that is "right place, right time", of course, but definitely more my thing than Wayfarers. Discounting the emotional bits, I do think the book could stand to be built better – the narration is occasionally very plain and sometimes approaching shoddy. But hey, the ideas and feelings make it easy to gloss over that and enjoy it regardless. (Also, I cannot read this kind of fiction without thinking of how Delany would dissect it.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.