The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

I have to confess that I spent at least the first third of Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds mostly annoyed and disappointed by the writing. I found the writing flat, the world-building slim, and the character relationships implausible, simplistic, and melodramatic. But around halfway through, the book, despite its flaws, started to grow on me somewhat and by the halfway point I was mostly in, though I still had some major issues.

The setting is a far-future in a universe populated by different types of humans, including Terrans, Sadiri, and Zhinuvians, each with varying degrees and types of psionic powers, such as telepathy or emotional “broadcasting.” When the Sadiri home planet is destroyed, one group settles on Cygnus Beta and begins a search for “Cygnians with a high percentage of taSadiri genetic heritage.” The main character, a Cygnian biotechnician named ... Read More

The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord

The Galaxy Game is Barbadian author Karen Lord’s third novel, following the critically acclaimed and award-winning Redemption in Indigo and last year’s well-received The Best of All Possible Worlds.

Something I want to get out of the way right from the start: while it’s not stated anywhere on the book’s cover, The Galaxy Game is the sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds. I very much wish this had been made more clear from the onset, not for me (as I’ve read The Best of All Possible Worlds) but for any unsuspecting readers who haven’t. The book takes place in the same fictional universe, a few years after the conclusion of the first novel. More significantly, s... Read More

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

Redemption in Indigo (2010) by Karen Lord is a beautiful, sly, innovative book that is doing much more than it seems to be on the surface. The frame story is the folktale of Ansige the glutton. Lord’s retelling takes Paama, a skilled cook and Ansige’s estranged wife, as its protagonist. At the beginning of the book, she has left Ansige and returned to her own family to decide what she’ll do next. But after missing his wife’s constant attention to his endless appetite, Ansige comes looking for her. In typical folktale logic, he is humiliated three times, tricked by djombi (who are spirits or deities), before leaving Paama in peace.

But where the folktale ends, Lord’s novel really begins. Because after Ansige leaves, Paama is left with the Chaos Stick, a magical artifact th... Read More