152 pages
Published 2022
Read from April 21 to April 22
Rating: 4 out of 5
It’s been just over a month since I read A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Even in such a short amount of time, I’ve lost so much of my already meager optimism for the future.
Things were already so bad, three years into an ongoing pandemic and some fifty years into a meticulously planned extreme-right takeover of our institutions, but somehow they keep getting worse at an accelerating rate. Christofascists in dozens of state legislatures have been working around the clock to genocide trans and genderqueer people, to exclude and further marginalize already marginalized groups of every description, to mandate their own hateful and poisonous worldview.
I know that instilling hopelessness is one of the psychological weapons in the fascist arsenal, and I know that our strength as caring and humane humans lies in community and solidarity against those who would dominate us, but some days it overwhelms me. I don’t know if it will be safe for me and my queer siblings anywhere in this country next year, next decade, next month.
All of which makes A Prayer for the Crown-Shy hit different. As a follow-up to Wild-Built, Prayer feels less like a cohesive story and more like a string of vignettes that accumulate softly and beautifully but never fully add up to more. The end result is sweet — gently melancholy, aching with a very human sense of longing for things and senses unknown. Although the ongoing pandemic only shows its face in the acknowledgments, its visage can be glimpsed in Dex and Mosscap’s questions: even in a world where our basic needs are met, beautifully and sustainably, humans and robots alike need something, and we don’t know what it is, only that we can help each other, even if we don’t know the right words right now.
If dreams of a better world were what I got from Wild-Built, a reminder of the need for community and support is what Crown-Shy taught me.
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