A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

 Turning the last page of A Prayer for the Crown-Shy while sitting under a darkening sky, the waves lapping their way up the abandoned shore on the last night of a week spent on this small patch of sand between islands, was just perfect. 

The second in the Monk and Robot series somehow managed to worm its way into my soul even more so than the first. 

I don’t know how to be, most days, and Chambers manages to weave that up into whole persons with deftness. I really liked this book.

The Keeper by Tana French

In her third and final installment in the Cal Hooper series, French unspools the ways of being that create community ties, identity threads, and the fabric of life in a place. The result is the antithesis of the oft-overused and too-hip idea of “placemaking;” French shows how the community bends us to it, and all the ways that bending around a community is what makes it real, and how we, in turn, are made real by the effort. This is a picture of co-constructed reality. It’s an anthem against fast-anything, corporate profit-grabbing, and the idea that a place can be for sale. 

I’ll miss Trey and Lena even more than I’ll miss Cal.