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A Psalm For The Wild-Built

by Becky Chambers, 2021

Published: 2021.11.03

Home > Book Reviews > Becky Chambers > A Psalm For The Wild‑Built

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★ (of 5)

(* Goodreads says the hardcover version has 160 pages, but there simply aren’t any other pages beyond the 147 listed above.)

 

Summary

The first of a duology (to be followed by A Prayer For The Crown-Shy in 2022), A Psalm For The Wild-Built is a novella set on Panga, a habitable moon of a gas giant planet called Motan. Sometime in distant history, the robots on Panga achieved consciousness and walked away from humanity. Since then, the humans on Panga decided to restore balance to the ecology (previously destroyed by overconsumption) and set aside half the land area for nature preserves. In the novella’s present, tea monk Sibling Dex travels from village to village offering custom tea blends and a listening ear to anyone willing to partake.

At some point, Dex decides serving tea and listening to problems isn’t what they really want, so they head off into the unpopulated area. There, Dex meets a robot named Mosscap (full name: Splendid Speckled Mosscap) who is on a mission to meet humans and experience humanity. The two hike up a mountain and discover an old abandoned monastery, becoming friends along the way.

 

The Good

Unlike the previous Chambers books I’ve reviewed (The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet and Record Of A Spaceborn Few), this one seemed to have something of a traditional plot — or at least a story arc, mostly relating to the personal growth and struggles of the main character. And though the author seems to switch between British and American English in her previous books, this one is entirely in American English (though with “proper” used a few times in a way that seems more British than American).

Like her other books, it is simply pleasant. This point remains the biggest draw of Chambers’ writing — I did’t come away with the negative emotions that so many other stories press on me. While reading, and afterward, a sense of relaxation and calm descends on me and lingers. I can’t really explain this part. As in her other stories, society has fixed most of its ills, done the right thing, and most people are pretty darn awesome (three points which fix this firmly in the fiction camp, even it wasn’t obviously set in a fictional universe).

I continue to be impressed with Chambers’ world-building, and her descriptions of people and places and vehicles and scenery.

Points Off For...

I have no complaints about this book other than it’s about the right length for half a book, so why split the “duology” into two books? Assuming the second half is also going to be about this long, the publishing company could have chosen to NOT scam us and simply published a single, normal-length volume.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to unpack in this story that I didn’t get into here, all of it worthwhile and interesting. I highly recommend it.

 





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