A Half-Built Garden
ByPublisher Description
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach.
On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm—and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force.
But the watershed networks that rose up to save the planet from corporate devastation aren't ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they reorganized humanity around the hope of keeping the world livable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they've started to heal our wounded planet.
Now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if anyone accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone’s eyes turned skyward, the future hinges on Judy's effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities111 Reviews
Liv
Created 19 days ago
“I found the idea of friendl aliens even if a bit overzealous quite nice and how throughout the story problems were solved. I picked the book up on a whim and I'm not a big fan of religion in science fiction so that was really not interesting to me.”Ruxandra Grr
Created about 2 months ago
“On the one hand, I simply adored a million things about this! On the other hand, the writing felt so damn dry, that it was almost impossible to read and it took me two weeks in small increments. To be fair, my brain has been reaching for audiobooks a lot more lately and I've had more challenges with eyeball reading (note to self: might I need glasses or is my anxiety just too big?).
So, as I was talking with a friend, we were both having the vibes that this is like Dawn as written by Becky Chambers - and I saw that there's another review describing it thus. I would also add a He, She and It comparison, for the way it's lovingly grounded in Jewish culture and also for the concept of having these decentralized areas coexisting with corporations, as well as an interest in parenthood (which, btw, I absolutely loved in this one and in the other one as well!)
The whole conceit is similar to the one in Xenogenesis, but it's treated in the way that I would maybe write it. I remember at the Xenogenesis book club, I was like: there could have been another way to deal with the aliens, this is what I'd do! And so I'm extremely biased, but I really really loved this. It presents a complexity of points of view, of arguments, of cultures, all focused on the idea of connecting, co-living, learning together, child rearing and many other things and it stuck the landing in an amazing way. The author (or Malka Older? it's mentioned in the acknowledgments) called it diaperpunk and that's funny, but I'd also say this is the first solarpunk full length novel I've read so far. And it's edited by Carl Engle-Laird, of The Locked Tomb fame!
This is extremely nerdy about social relationships and ways of living and it kinda engages with all the critiques I usually have about books that takes place in the future ('why do these people act like our contemporaries and not as belonging to that world?', 'why are families organized the same as ours?', etc etc). It is highly detailed and interesting in its details. There are lovely thematic parallels all over (like the main household is formed by two couples, the aliens are of two different races in symbiosis and so on).
The one thing that didn't work for me was the emotional level. And when I say that, I mean that Judy didn't feel like the most engaging character. She is basically a well-intentioned balanced woman, with anxiety, whose main character trait in play is that she is a bit indecisive. I feel that I wouldn't really change anything about the plot, what I'd wanted was a bit more closeness and emotional presence from her, because she feels distant, even though in her first person POV she tells us what she is feeling.
Otherwise, there is a great deal of emotional wisdom in this book, in how conflicts are treated. And some emotional moments did really hit well. The first one was this family meeting with the two co-parenting couples working through some heavy stuff and Carol (Judy's partner) had everyone breathe together and facilitated the catharsis in a really great way (the way I would have done it, anyway, lol, BIASES). Then there's a sweet interspecies date moment that got me giggling and a Passover Seder meal that made me emotional. And I think I've said this already, but the resolution was absolutely great.
Will definitely check out more books by Emrys in the future, because even if this was very slow to get through, I could talk about so many elements of the book for hours (thankfully, there's book club tomorrow!!!)”Di
Created about 2 months agoJo
Created 4 months agoAbout Ruthanna Emrys
Other books by Ruthanna Emrys
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