All the Birds in the Sky

I bought this book on impulse at the library book sale because I recognized the author, who recently released a short story collection with an interesting name (Six Months, Three Days, Five Others) that I've been wanting to read. I knew basically nothing going into it except that it was pretty short. I'm not usually one to take a chance like that (my to-read list is long enough that I often obsessively research a book before actually buying it), but it worked out well this time.

The book follows two people: a witch named Patricia and a technophile named Laurence. They meet in a horribly rigid private school in eighth grade. They strike up a tenuous friendship because they're both outcast and desperate for companionship. But when an assassin determined to kill them both starts messing with their lives, they end up separated. Years later they reconnect, only to discover that they're now on opposite sides of a war for the future of the planet.

All the Birds in the Sky takes place in either the present or near-future. The world is fast becoming uninhabitable. One group of people is obsessed with improving technology, and they've decided that the best thing for the future of humanity is to find another planet to spread to before Earth dies. The witches don't think it's that simple: what's so special about humans anyway and why should they be saved at the expense of all the other life on Earth?

The book ends up being an interesting meditation of the individual vs society and man vs nature. It finds novel ways to combine those two questions and doesn't give any easy answers. As the book wound down, I actually found myself deeply unsure about how it would end. How could it possibly reach a satisfying conclusion? That uncertainty made me love this book even more, and I'm still thinking about the questions it raised. I'm even more eager to get my hands on Anders' short stories now.

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