A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

For more information click here or talk to your local librarian. Friends groups raise money for improvements to their library through memberships, used book sales and other activities. There is a “Friends of the Library” group for most branch libraries and departments of the Central Library. You can support the Los Angeles Public Library in several ways: With more people than ever before using the library-a record 17 million last year alone-your support helps the Library provide people with the resources they need to succeed and thrive. Through its Central Library and 72 branches, the Los Angeles Public Library provides free and easy access to information, ideas, books and technology that enrich, educate and empower every individual in our city's diverse communities. The Los Angeles Public Library serves the largest most diverse population of any library in the United States. One can’t help but remain hopeful that the next entry will live up to the high bar set by the first two. In A Prayer for the Crown Shy, there is no “sophomore slump,” but a strong continuation of the thoughtful and hopeful explorations begun in the first book in this series. Panga was not only very much like Earth’s present, but also represents a future we would be lucky to achieve. The award winning Chambers expands the world, or more properly, moon building begun in the first novella to show more of Panga’s inhabitants, how they live and how they have recovered from the ecologically disastrous period that almost destroyed their world, moving to living in harmony with it and its eco-system. Like A Psalm for the Wild-Built, A Prayer for the Crown Shy is a quiet novella that is quirky, thoughtful, and hopeful. And each location lends itself to observations, conversations, and ruminations about, with deference to Douglas Adams, life, the universe, and everything. Like our world, each settlement has a different personality, whether it is the mini-City of Stump, Shipwreck’s technophobic inhabitants, or the farm where Sibling Dex was born and raised. In A Prayer for the Crown Shy, Chambers returns to Panga and follows Sibling Dex and Mosscap as they travel through the different areas and settlements of Panga on their way to the City. Until the day a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap walked up to Sibling Dex, a tea monk, and asked “What do people need?”

In 2021, Becky Chambers introduced readers to the moon of Panga, where, centuries ago, the civilization’s robots gained consciousness and, en masse, walked off into the surrounding wilderness and were never heard from again.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers