These themes are as tenderly explored in this series as everything else.
They say, “I see you too, and I get it.” And sometimes there is nothing more powerful, or more intoxicating, than that. To its readers, these books speak with intention and kindness and unrelenting feeling. Monk & Robot retroactively renders that painful experience, familiar to many of us, less painful just by virtue of seeing its characters, truly seeing them, and placing itself in their corner. This is the kind of lost some of us might go our whole lives trying to accommodate because it hurts too much to face it head-on, like pulling your own heart out by the roots. The kind of lost you cannot help and cannot explain there is only the feeling, deeper than words, that something is missing, something you hadn’t named yet, or perhaps you are simply not letting yourself know. This is what I love most about these books-how they give language to those of us who never learned in college or media or life how to deal with being lost, with feeling that you have wandered out of the right life, forgotten who you are and kept turning up in all the wrong places assuming different faces. Which is, incidentally, what our Monk and Robot duo-Dex and Mosscap-have found in each other. I love the author's unerring talent for capturing hard feelings with unexpected words, how sometimes Chambers would quietly unload on the page a line so powerful, so devastating, that it would press the breath from my lungs: “ How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?” These have quickly become my favorite moments, when reading begins to feel like overhearing a confession, a pouring out of inarticulable truths that can only emerge when you finally find someone with whom you can just sit on the ground and breathe. Becky Chambers is fantastic at expressing so precisely things I can talk about endlessly: like the transformative power of love and queer community, the beauty and strangeness of how we eke meaning out of our surroundings, and how joy and beauty can sometimes be so mundane that, in that simplicity, they become utterly radical.
There is something in these books that goes right to the heart of things. The dedication for the first book states, “ For anybody who could use a break,” and for this book it reads, “ For anybody who doesn’t know where they’re going.” It must be said that half the joy of reading this series is one of a promise kept.
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