I really enjoyed Robson’s other book that I read and looked forward to this one. It’s a complicated future where some people are nats (natural) and others are made (i.e. cloned) and the people who are made can be bought and sold like property. Arlo and his friend Drienne go from being brand ambassadors which is a cool but also sort of vapid job, to being purchased to participate in a heist which winds up being not at all what it seems. A lot of little side stories give this novel some good depth.

This book is great just like everyone says. A group of sentient robots of various forms and previous purposes come into awareness in a shut down restaurant in the middle of San Francisco (itself inside of a seceded California) during a torrential downpour. They do not have many rights, but they do have a few ideas and some plucky can-do attitudes. We get to learn more about each of them and their different personalities, and watch them manage starting their own business in a culture that has a small but strong anti-robot bias.

If you’ve read Cory’s stuff here or elsewhere, you will know the skeleton of this book. This is a full treatment, including all the ancillary parts that go into how it happened and a big chunk of stuff at the end about what could possibly be done. I’m not quite the target audience for this book because I may know the topic too well, but it was good to have a refresher and learn more neologisms like enshitternet &c. Accessible to more than just the usual suspects with a lot of useful detail and a decent dollop of humor.

Fans of the Thursday Murder Club will likely enjoy this one. It’s got all our favorites (& a few new ones) who are all doing their things as they try to figure out why someone was trying to kill Joyce’s son-in-law’s best man. That guy disappears, his colleague gets killed, there’s a lot of bitcoin in play and a few side quests and some tasty baked goods. It sounds like there’s a lot going on but it mostly makes sense together. Osman always thanks librarians in the acknowledgments; I will read these books as long as they are published.

Four young Black women, all friends, all living slightly different lives, care for each other and their hair in this series of vignettes about life in the Bronx. There’s a lot going on and each woman has a different backstory and set of issues they are grappling with. It’s lovely to see this collection of day-in-the-life that acknowledges that friendships can both be complicated but also deeply nurturing. [Robyn Smith was the artist]

This is a nice, simple non-fiction graphic novel by trans non-binary graphic novelist Theo Parish talking about their lifelong journey towards figuring out how to be at home in their body. It’s matter of fact, very well-illustrated, talks mainly about who was supportive (and not who wasn’t) and drills down a little into some topics like deadnaming and gender identity vs. sexual preference. Ultimately it’s a story of achievement and acceptance.

This graphic novel about the history of video games should have been right up my alley. But it was too meta for me--the illustrator and writer are also characters in the book--and, for a history, it jumped around all over the place. I knew a lot of the raw facts from other books. I read through the first few chapters and was just not interested in keeping up with it.

Tchaikovsky writes a lot of books and I like most of them. This one is a bit of a first contact story which has a LOT of discussion (both show and tell) of alien intelligence and a dystopian future in which people have left earth and only exist in corporate-run resource-exploitation schemes mowing down whatever is in their path. Some Lovecraftian sense of “What is OUT THERE?” It’s got a lot of spookiness to it and also left me with a lot of questions since it ended somewhat abruptly. Ripe for a sequel.