All the Birds in the Sky (Charlie Jane Anders)

All the Birds in the Sky
Charlie Jane Anders
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy/Sci-Fi
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: Patricia was an ordinary young girl until she spoke with a bird and learned she must be a witch. Laurence found plans online for a two-second time machine, beginning a lifelong love affair with technology. They met as fellow outcasts in school, bonding through misery, but their lives would soon veer in radically different directions... and, if one assassin's vision is correct, the two will one day bring about the end of the world in a cataclysmic confrontation between magic and science.

REVIEW: When a story threatens to end the world and kill the characters it has painstakingly created in my imagination, and my reaction as a reader is to cheer on the apocalypse, something has gone wrong.
Just when All the Birds in the Sky lost me is difficult to pin down, but tremors could be felt early. Both Laurence and Patricia come from miserable homes with parents whose sole goal seems to be thwarting their children's dreams and any chance they have to find happiness, misery that takes on a surreal air in a world that contains both impossible magic and near-future technology. At first, I wanted to like them, but soon Laurence and then Patricia devolve into self-described assholes, prone to terrible attitudes, weaselly actions, and general spinelessness, not to mention major bouts of amnesia that, I guess, were supposed to wipe my mind too of major developments; that's the only reason I could think of for the plot-extending lapses, unless the author wanted me to spend half the book shouting angrily at the characters (figuratively, of course - though I came close to actual outbursts a time or two when they stretched my already-thin suspension of disbelief too far.)
The world retains a dreamlike quality throughout, with the public world of technology being every bit as exaggerated and implausible as the hidden world of magic. Both are populated with swarms of characters I often couldn't keep straight, all of whom are broken and cold and manipulative in their own ways, not to mention swarming with red herrings that nibble up too much page time simply to drive home the fact that society is broken beyond all reasonable hope of repair. Even the birds are jerks, here. (How bad does a world have to be that I don't even care if the birds survive?)
In any event, the plot crawls and lurches between prolonged bouts of whining and self-destructive behavior by Laurence and Patricia as everything inches toward the prophesied apocalypse, reliant on forced circumstances and deliberately botched efforts at communication to ratchet up tension and stakes... though, as I mentioned earlier, the stakes failed to ratchet up that high for me owing to the fact that I would've been just as happy seeing the lot of them fall into a bottomless pit.
Skirting spoilers, by the end I was half-convinced that I was never really supposed to like or even believe in the world the characters inhabited as anything but a metaphor. Which is fine, if that's what one likes. There are some interesting images and nice ideas at play here that I haven't seen before, but the ideas alone couldn't make me care about it when I couldn't care about the characters or believe their situations. This just isn't the kind of story I enjoy reading, and not the kind I intend to read again if I can at all help it.

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