Strange Dogs

It took me a while to finish this novella, because I thought I would get it over with before I started Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse #8) and instead I went into a reading slump for a couple of weeks, all of my book club got ahead of me in the novel and I decided to start the novel myself abandoning this a third of the way in.

The novella can actually be pretty enjoyable even without reading any of the Expanse novels, so you can read this and have no idea of the context, but of course, some of that will spoil the setting and the enjoyment of the novels.

This is your warning to stop reading if you have not read The Expanse.

The protagonist of this story is Cara, a young girl living in Laconia, one of many planets that are being inhabited and colonized by humans in this universe.

Cara has lived her whole life in this place, with no memory of Earth, often confused by how her parents miss things she is doing fine without. As such, her perspective is rather interesting, innocent and naive.

This planet has been rather nice, with a small colony of people settling in, and doing science stuff, such as Cara’s parents, but all of a sudden, a military force has arrived, slowly expanding and building up more infrastructure. This novels deals with the powerlessness of such a situation, although it’s not the main focus.

Laconia houses a variety of unique species, often named based on their similarity to Earth’s. One time, Cara accidentally kills a bird with a small pack of babies. After futile attempts to rescue momma bird—as she called it—that only end up with her breaking more things, trying to also keep the baby birds alive, her equipment is taken away by some strange dogs, who seem to understand her and want to help her. After some time, she discovers they were able to fix the things she broke—a drone that was her mother’s. However, they also fixed momma bird. The repercussions of this are unforeseen to her.

Again, this story is part from The Expanse and in case it’s not clear, it kind of becomes Pet Sematary in space—I never read the book but recall some of the scenes in the old movie. This was a bit hard for me at first given the story is given from a child’s perspective and it has a very different tone, with no presence of any familiar characters. Even so, the writing is strong as ever and it possesses a very eery feeling that kept me hooked during the second half when some events started to unfold.

If you are up for some weird aliens doing weird stuff and humans messing around with things they don’t understand, you should give it a go!

I highly recommend checking all of the Expanse a go though, it has been an awesome series to read through.

This is day 75 of #100DaysToOffload