A Prayer for the Crown-Shy: A Monk and Robot Book (Monk & Robot 2)

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The people are nearly always friendly and Mosscap spends his time asking them what they need which usually turns out to be very minor. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a 2022 solarpunk novella written by Becky Chambers and published by Tor. They pursed their lips, realizing they’d forgotten to fetch their towel before getting in the shower.

Mosscap is learning about what it means to be sentient and making choices about themselves and their future. It was only after they’d spent years converting unfiltered sun into life-giving sugar that they began to expand horizontally, transforming into behemoths as the centuries drummed on. It made me cry the good sort of tears--the sort when someone is unexpectedly kind to you at the moment you need it most. As Mosscap fussed with connecting the biogas tank to the fire drum, Dex pulled out their pocket computer and opened their mailbox.

The hard climb to Hart’s Brow was more than a week behind them, but Dex’s body was still feeling it, and they had made no secret of this.

Small ribbons had been tied to it by countless passersby, their colors faded and fraying in the open air. By which I mean, this is a gentle, healing, beautiful book that also doesn’t shy away from the reality of sadness and lostness, or the general complexity of humans and human relations. While the narrator does a good job with subtly voicing the characters, she has a weird way of subtly emphasising the neutral pronouns used for Sibling Dex, which actually contributed to my occasional confusion about who was being referred to. Whereas with A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Dex was the student and Mosscap was the teacher, those roles get reversed here as Dex introduces Mosscap to elements of human culture. I liked this one as much if not more than the first book: we are now in a more established world, and that gives Chambers the freedom to dig deeper at her wonderful characters, something she is particularly good at.

By the end of the book, Dex and Mosscap both realise that they don't know what they need but they want to work out the answer to that question together. It stopped before a road sign, placing its hinged hands on its matte-silver hips as it read the text to itself. I know she didn't suddenly develop sentience and was hinting to me with that phrase, but a part of me wants to believe that's what it was.

The following is not an original thought and I’m plagiarizing something I saw on Goodreads, but it holds true and is worth repeating: Becky Chambers’ A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is one of those books that when the Advance Readers Copy lands in your inbox, you drop everything and immediately read it for review purposes, forgetting that we’re still three-ish months away from its release date and there are other books I have on my plate that are coming up sooner than that. Perhaps this is a good thing because A Psalm for the Wild-Built was a lot to live up to and just turning in a carbon copy would have diminished that book. The themes of belonging, of taking time for yourself, are so strong and so wonderful to explore with. There are tender moments scattered here and there throughout the read, but this book has none of Dex’s wisdom offering tea monk services (they’re more of a guide in this novella), and the towns they visit are crowded with fans and onlookers, thus not offering the kind of solitude that A Psalm for the Wild-Built brought to readers by being set in the forests and mountains.The almost unique feature of the series – there are no antagonists, no ‘bad’ / ‘evil’ characters – everyone is eager to help and made you happy or at least content, it is an extremely altruistic society that lives a sustainable life, quite unlike our world.

And once you’ve ditched the mentally ill you’re in this whole eugenics-ey groove without even noticing how you got there: I mean, what about people with disabilities, and queerness is kind of complicated, and would it just be easier all-round if everyone was white. If you’ve read A Psalm for the Wild-Built, you’ll already know that Chambers uses the pronoun “they” for Dex, and this comes off as less intrusive and confusing in this book (part of a lot of readers’ complaints about the first novella was that they weren’t always sure if “they” was referring to just Dex or Dex and other people in scenes with two or more folks — or a robot). She spends her free time playing video and tabletop games, keeping bees, and looking through her telescope. The issue was that the robots started to replace the human workforce and without the need to work, the balance of civilisation shifted and began to falter. The kind of lost you cannot help and cannot explain; there is only the feeling, deeper than words, that something is missing, something you hadn’t named yet, or perhaps you are simply not letting yourself know.Dex is willing to accommodate everyone else’s feelings and emotions, but never gives them self permission to lean on others. As they mastered the art of brewing the perfect blend of tea whilst listening to the concerns of others, they still found a gaping hole in their life that they couldn’t fulfil.