A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

November 22, 2019

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

The second book in the Wayfarer trilogy begins 28 minutes after the first book (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet) ended.  Lovelace, the original AI from the Wayfarer, is in a new body, which she refers to as a kit, traveling in the company of Pepper, Jenks' friend, to her home on the moon of Coriol.  It's a hard adjustment, going from a virtual existence to the limitations of a physical being.

Overall, this is a great follow up to the first book.  My only disappointment is that, while the story features some of the characters from the first book, we don't meet up again with the crew from the Wayfarer.  We do get Pepper’s backstory and how she ended up as a tech pro on Coriol, and Chambers does a great job of imagining what it would be like for Lovelace (now called Sidra) waking up in an alien body.  One of the things I didn’t like:  the predator animal on Pepper’s original planet is a gene-tweaked dog – I would have preferred some other animal, like a beaver/bear hybrid.  Looking forward to the third book, Record of a Spaceborn Few.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

October 13, 2019

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley

After solving her first case, 11 year old Flavia de Luce is sure that her career as an amateur sleuth is over.  Then a well-known puppeteer is electrocuted in the middle of a performance at the church hall, and Flavia finds herself once again in the thick of it.  The death of a local child five years earlier and a patch of marijuana plants are also somehow involved in the investigation.  Meanwhile, Flavia’s widowed stamp-collecting father continues to have financial problems threatening the family home, and his sister Felicity comes from Hampstead to try to sort them out.

I wasn’t sure I liked Flavia in the first book in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, but she grew on me.  As a kid, Flavia can go snoop in all kinds of places and ask questions that adults are too polite to ask.  Her knowledge of chemistry comes into play more than once in the story.

One of the things I dislike about the series is that it takes at least 1/3 of the book to get to the mystery - there is a lot of time spent on setting up the scene.  However, I do enjoy Flavia’s eccentric family and quirky neighbors.  Aunt Felicity in particular surprises Flavia in this book by telling her that she looks and acts exactly like her late mother Harriet, and to pursue her dreams (Flavia always thought Felicity was an old stick in the mud).