Earth Logic

It's taken me a long time to finish this, and I don't know if it's because I'm out of practice reading books on paper, or if it's that it's a ... well, it's a complex read. What I love about it also makes it somewhat impenetrable at times: it operates on a level of emotional nuance and subtlety that sometimes means you have to read conversations a few times over to figure out what's going on beneath the surface. You have to get to know the way the characters think, react and feel... just like in real life, a simple conversation is often much more than that, and the meaning each person takes away from it might differ. It's a slowly-unfolding read that builds and grows more like a plant than an action movie. There's never a moment that leaves you breathless, but there is a sense of going deeper and deeper into the story and its people, of coming to know them almost as old friends, of chewing on the larger political problems that they are trying to disentangle. Above all I love the coziness of the everyday scenes, the way this group of old friends becomes a family to each other, with all the give and take, all the frustration and caretaking that this implies. If Fire Logic was a love story at heart, this one may be a story of chosen family. And of course there are the larger questions of justice and reparations, of what is lost in war that cannot ever be made right, of how one cannot help but be changed even in fighting to remain oneself.