Karen Lord’s 2013 The Best of All Possible Worlds was her second novel. To paraphrase the author’s site, it
won the Frank Collymore Literary Award for 2009. […] It also won the 2013 RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and was nominated for Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the 2014 Locus Awards Best Science Fiction Novel.
And yet, while I like elements of it, I cannot warm to the novel as a whole. Not every reviewer is a good fit for every book.
Despite their generous efforts to provide the other human races of the galaxy with their wise guidance, not everyone loves the Sadiri. Their cousins on Ain dislike the Sadiri enough to reduce their homeworld and everyone on it to ash. Only the Sadiri lucky enough to be offworld survive the disaster.
Cygnus Beta1 is no stranger to refugees. Indeed, the one thing its disparate peoples tend to have in common is a calamitous event in their past that triggered a desperate migration. It is therefore a logical place for some of the surviving Sadiri to settle, a place where they might build new lives for themselves.
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