Book Review: All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders
2016
Awards: Nebula, Locus (Fantasy)
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

All the Birds in the Sky is a story in the old traditional pattern of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl become central figures on opposing sides in a potentially world-ending conflict. It had a lot of potential, and certainly some funny, endearing, and dramatic moments. But, on the whole, it did not wear as well as it might have.

The novel is the story of two kids, both outcasts, who meet in elementary school and become frenemies. Patricia is a nascent witch who loves the outdoors and, at least at one point, learns how to talk to birds. Laurence is a techno-nerd who is building an artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet. Their parents are hopeless and the other schoolchildren taunt them both mercilessly.

Saddled with talents they don’t yet know how to control, they struggle through junior high and high school, unaware that they’re being stalked by a ninja assassin posing as their guidance counselor, whose plots they keep escaping by accident.

Eventually they each respectively find groups of people who understand and support them, and who train them to focus their powers in productive but opposing directions. In Patricia’s case, it is a group of witches, and in Laurence’s case, it is a group of astrophysicists working for a multizillionaire inventor patterned a little too obviously after Elon Musk.

Both Patricia and Laurence are trying to solve the problem of global climate changes from their own angles. But Laurence’s team’s experiments go horribly wrong and send one of his co-workers into another dimension of space-time. Patricia helps him out by rescuing the co-worker with witchcraft, but her help, as is the case with most powerful spells, comes with unintended consequences, and unintentionally ratchets up the simmering tension between Laurence’s team and the team of witches.

Eventually the whole thing culminates in a somewhat contrived apocalyptic battle royal of magic versus science, with Patricia and Laurence on opposite sides. The fate of the Earth hangs in the balance while they try to figure out how to end the conflict and how to admit how they feel about each other.

As a coming-of-age romance, it is generally effective and enjoyable. As a science fiction story of an Armageddonish duel between two formidable sides, it is wanting.

There are certainly funny episodes in the book. The first time the birds talk to Patricia is hilarious. And it’s amusing when Patricia jokingly identifies their guidance counselor as an assassin based on his shoes, because, of course, he really is an assassin.

But the way the kids think and talk doesn’t always ring true or consistent; in particular, Laurence is a little too precocious and snarky when he talks to his parents, compared to the way he talks and thinks the rest of the time. Anders also tries just a little too hard to be funny in Laurence’s internal dialog, and most of the time it ends up clanking, like when he interprets his dinner as “turnip slurry.” (FEED author Seanan McGuire does this sort of thing much more skillfully, in a somewhat similar genre with somewhat similar main characters.)

The wealthy inventor Laurence works for is a little too obvious a carbon copy of Elon Musk. Anders relies too much on the cleverness of the very slight changes she makes to his image and company, rather than using him as inspiration and putting her own unique twist on the character.

And although Anders puts all she has into the Transformers/monster-movie-style climax, it is more workmanlike than actually exciting. In general, the backstories of the kids—especially Patricia—and the ramp up to the final confrontation are more interesting than the confrontation itself. In the end, I'm afraid to say that the book falls disappointingly flat.