Reviews - Un psaume pour les recyclés sauvages

33.9k reviews for:

Un psaume pour les recyclés sauvages

Becky Chambers

4.35 AVERAGE

papabearcoco's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

humanbean6483's review against another edition

3.0

Nothing much happened and I didn’t feel very connected to the characters. The world was cool but meh

chaydata's review against another edition

4.0

inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

It gets you thinking philosophically. The story felt somewhat relatable this summer, since I got too busy and never went camping until the fall when I finally said F it, I'm going to go... And I went camping on my own in the dark. It was scary, but also wonderful.

Anyway, I have thoughts about this book...

At times especially near the beginning it felt a bit slow to me and I was wondering if I would even get to the end of the book. I was listening to the audiobook version so that probably helped. Then it it all accelerates and suddenly it was over and I was really enjoying it.

I think the robot doesn't even appear until about 40% of the way through. There were few events that were keeping my interest up until that point. But again, once it gets rolling down the hill then it really gets going.

It was fun exploring having a gender non-binary main character using they/them pronouns, and then the robot that emphatically wants "it" pronouns. It makes you wonder about what pronouns we should use for non-human living things or AI. I still like to think that animals would prefer they/them unless if we know their gender instead of "it". In my mind, plants are fine as "it"s, because they're non-sentient, unlike animals, and anyway even if we go by sex instead of gender, it's so hard to tell a plant's sex, or sometimes one plant is both sexes or it's complicated like that. But anyway, all that said, cool that the robot asserted what it prefers, and I like the message to check your own biases and just respect what a person chooses.

Also just funny that the main character's name was "Dex" which sounded much more robotic than "Mosscap" which was the robot's name.

I personally felt really annoyed that Dex wanted to give the robot food, to satisfy some ingrained etiquette, even though it wasn't able to eat it. I think this aspect kind of ran counter to the point of the story, or maybe I was projecting my own philosophy. Some things that we do in society should be questioned, and don't really make sense, and we should be able to break free of them. Maybe I was just supposed to think it was cute and not overthink it.

But of course when it comes to questioning society's norms, I'm thinking of the ubiquity of animal agriculture. By the way, there was a decent amount of animal food described, but I also appreciated the beans and vegetables meal. But funny that that's the ONE meal that got burnt.

The robot or the narrator says that isolated attempts at saving the environment failed. I found this really depressing. Although I guess it's true, the goal is to have wider uptake and changing systems. Maybe I should take what the book said as more of a warning, or call to action.

There were also a number of contemplative, relaxing tea and nature scenes that were pleasant to take in. And that's worth something.