A Half-Built Garden

It's probably more of a high 3.5.

This is another of those arcs of mine which got put on the back burner because I couldn't focus and could only manage to get to it now coz I got my hands on the audiobook, which was very helpful and I finished listening the whole thing in less than 4 days. But now trying to review it isn't an easy task.

I'm unsure how to categorize this one in ways I understand. It has many characters who have varying motivations and values and methods of dealing with issues, but we also only get one POV which doesn't lend itself to too much character development. There is exploring of relationships - motherhood and in general, child rearing playing a very important part of this book - and we see how new bonds are made between people of various species with varied interests, and how this affects the overall fate of the people and the planet/habitat.

But it's also not a completely plot focused novel. It's a very simple plot point if we think about it - aliens are here who think earth will not survive and want to take all of humanity onto their space habitats (maybe by force) and it's the turn of various communities on earth who have been working tirelessly to reverse the effects of climate change, to convince them otherwise. How this happens is the plot. But the way the author goes about it involves contemplation, arguments, discussions, consensus building and not any big action set pieces that we would expect from these kind of futuristic novels.

Ultimately what remains in our memory after finishing the book is all the concepts that are explored here. There are watershed communities that have been formed around large sustaining rivers who have worked incessantly to bring more ecological balance and reverse the drastic effects of climate change. The technology they use combined with their negotiation methods and how they build consensus to solve methods feels like something to aspire to if we ever want to actually solve problems which are plaguing our world today. We also see corporations and how they've created their own world within the world, but I don't think we got a clearly sense of how their hierarchy and structure works. Their way of treating everything like a game wasn't something I understood entirely, but I did understand the resentments some of the people living in those lands had against the watersheds. The watersheds ofcourse have their own grievances with the corporations which destroyed the world for their greed. But the author also does an interesting job of giving us mostly clear cut notions of who is ultimately responsible for how close the earth came to collapse, but also the fact that playing a blame game decades later doesn't help anyone and it's more necessary to work together.

This idea of consensus building is greatly put to the test when our main protagonist and her family have to argue their case in front of the aliens for wanting to stay on earth, confident that the work they've put into is helping restore balance to the planet and more can be done with the help of the Ringer's high tech. The author illustrates the importance of trying to understand each other view points, the necessity of negotiating with even those people who've tried to harm you, and how understanding each other's motivations and goals and helping each other in bettering everyone is the only way to resolve conflict without violence.

Ultimately, I felt it was an admirable attempt at creating a hopeful story of building families and communities which will all work together to avert disasters. Its nicely aided by an eccentric cast of characters - both humans and aliens and their respective delightful children - and lots of intense negotiations and conversations. But while I hope that humanity is capable of being this community oriented, the cynic in me thinks it's unrealistically hopeful and that optimism of it all just made me sad, coz it felt impossible. However, I'm very eager to see what more interesting concepts the author comes up with next in her books.

I don't think of myself as a big sci fi reader or fan. Occasionally I'll pick something up that has elements that sound appealing to me, but I don't seek out sci fi on purpose. I picked up A Half Built Garden because the theme of attempting to bring Earth back from the human caused brink of destruction appealed to me, but somehow the description I read failed to mention that there were aliens in this book. I might have steered clear if I had known, but then I would have missed a delightful surprise of a book. Judy Wallach-Stevens is an ecologist with the Chesapeake watershed, in a world which has reorganized itself into networks of watersheds, communities that monitor and tend their local bodies of water and their ecosystems. Decisions are made by technologically assisted consensus, where people share their knowledge to be able to come to decisions that treat humans as part of the ecosystem, but not more important than the ecosystem. The story begins when Judy is making her customary rounds one night and receives an alert that there is a disturbance. When she investigates, she finds an alien ship has landed...and the story takes off from there.

A Half-Built Garden has a fully imagined world, where family structure, gender, uses of technology, politics, diplomacy, and ethos with regard to the natural world are addressed. However, you learn about all of these things work as you watch Judy Wallach-Stevens deal with the repercussions of finding an alien spaceship in her watershed, rather than by being told about them explicitly. Ruthanna Emrys immerses her readers in her world skillfully, so that you enjoy the sensation of finding out about child rearing practices in this new world rather than feeling like you're groping around in an unfamiliar place.

Without giving anything more away about the plot, I will also say that this novel also deals with issues of consent, and of people coming in as rescuers when the supposed rescuees don't think they need to and don't want to be rescued. I really liked the way Emrys handled this topic.

Summary: I wouldn't have picked this book if I had really known what it was, but I was surprised all the way through by how much I liked it.