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

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Reading this book felt like stepping outside, dropping my shoulders and to breathing in that first breath of fresh air after a long day at work. I think you’ll bring a lot of perspective to the people we meet, even if all they do is see you walk by. I suspect it was my mood that kept me from enjoying the first one because I liked this one a lot more. If you are someone who thinks humans are better than goats and/or would like an optimistic view of the future of humanity, you might very well get along better with this book than I did. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.

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.However, while A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a notch below the previous book, it is still a commanding read. The robot behaves like a kid, for almost everything for it is new, stopping at every second tree or anthill to observe it. Lovely sci if set in a mysterious post something (yet to be explained hoping for more information in future books) Earth. By turns tender and philosophical, A Psalm for the Wild-Built was a book that was gentle and soothing, and just the type of novella that was so in tune with the times that it wound up on a Most Influential Science Fiction Books of All-Time list only months after it was published. Dex is willing to accommodate everyone else’s feelings and emotions, but never gives them self permission to lean on others.

Mosscap has a mission – to find out what people need, for after robots achieved sentience and people decided they cannot exploit them no more, for the last few centuries humans and robots lived without any communication. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is maybe less of a continuation in feel, and more of one that explores the flip side of the relationship between Dex and Mosscap. Published on 8 August 2019, To Be Taught, if Fortunate is Chambers first published novella outside of the Wayfarer universe. Dex has to help it, to work as a middle person and teach it what is ok and what is not in a society. The ending is particularly poignant, and you’ll probably feel sad when you close this quick read for good — which is an entirely alternate feeling that one might have had with the previous novella.I did come up with a slightly stretched metaphor about the first one being like a series of beads upon a rosary and the second more like a collection of psalms but then I remembered the first one is Psalm and the second one is Prayer, so I was talking nonsense. Becky has a background in performing arts, and grew up in a family heavily involved in space science. If you’ve read A Psalm for the Wild-Built, you’ll already know that Chambers uses the pronoun “they” for Dex, and this comes off as less intrusive and confusing in this book (part of a lot of readers’ complaints about the first novella was that they weren’t always sure if “they” was referring to just Dex or Dex and other people in scenes with two or more folks — or a robot). These are the best parts of the book, and there are a few instances where the world and the characters align and say something profound about the human condition.

So that isn’t really a complaint, just a random public confession about my intense feelings for robots.There are tender moments scattered here and there throughout the read, but this book has none of Dex’s wisdom offering tea monk services (they’re more of a guide in this novella), and the towns they visit are crowded with fans and onlookers, thus not offering the kind of solitude that A Psalm for the Wild-Built brought to readers by being set in the forests and mountains. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. In short, I love this series so much, it is as generous and loving as it is marvelous and deeply confronting. We do meet a diverse and interesting collection of humans, though, including a … I hesitate to say love interest … a friendly casual sex interest for Sibling Dex (the way this encounter is handled is so well done: there’s attraction, honesty and mutual respect on both sides, and breakfast, but no expectation of anything more or different between them at this time), a representative of group of humans who have chosen to reject all technology (again, this is handled with the delicacy that is typical of this author’s writing) and we get to meet Sibling Dex’s family. 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.