Like A Psalm for the Wild-Built before it, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a meandering and gentle novella, exploring what it means to have purpose and be satisfied with yourself and your role in your community. It’s beautifully written and philosophically engaging.
A Prayer for the Crown Shy picks up where A Psalm for the Wild-Built left off, with Tea Monk Dex and their new robot friend Mosscap travelling together across Panga, visiting human communities so Mosscap can learn about them. And Dex gets laid, which, frankly, it was about time.
A Prayer for the Crown Shy
Becky Chambers
Tordotcom
July 12, 2022
As Dex escorts Mosscap from town to town, Mosscap’s ostensible purpose is to ask each group of humans, “what do you need?” as the answers to that question become Mosscap’s datapoints of research on how humans are doing.
This question provides a framework for Mosscap’s interaction with human communities, but each introduction to a new community model is richer than the answer to this one question could be, both for Mosscap and for us readers. And as they travel along, Dex and Mosscap’s friendship deepens as well.
One of the things that makes the world feel so rich is Dex’s very embodied experience of it. Chambers describes Dex’s sore muscles, enjoyment of showers, and good food to an unusual degree of detail. Dex as a character thinks a lot about what they’re experiencing physically.
Mosscap, less explicitly focused on physical experience, is still thrilled to observe and interact. In A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Mosscap befriends a dog and a baby, and everyone is overjoyed about it, this reader included.
The variety of human settlements, towns, villages and communities across Panga offer diverse models of peaceful, generally utopian communities. While Panga doesn’t have money, for instance, the communities across it share a system of credit and thanks focused on contributing to others. These communities are not all the same as each other, but they share an overall religion and worldview that prioritizes sustainability.
Each community feels like an intentional community, and while Dex and Mosscap are great characters, the calm time spent in this calm world is a major draw of the Monk and Robot series. In A Prayer for the Crown-Shy we see even more of it and its denizens than we had in A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
We see Dex’s homestead, which for fans of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series may be reminiscent of the Aandrisk way of life Sissix introduces us to in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Mosscap and Dex’s stop there emphasizes the theme of being an individual while still embedded in a community that is prevalent in the series so far overall.
That theme makes it particularly interesting to me that Dex’s non-gendered pronouns are they/them, since it is significant which things Dex does alone, with other humans, or with Mosscap. I often had to reread passages to discern whether a singular or plural “they” was in use. For me personally, this had the effect of emphasizing focus on the theme of the individual’s interactions with the community.
As the book goes along, a gentle plot unfolds, of Dex grappling to come to terms with supporting others in their role as a tea monk while they are currently feeling unworthy of support. Just as Dex and Mosscap’s travels are exploratory rather than goal-oriented, Dex’s psychological journey is, too. Their travels with Mosscap, their own interactions with different kinds of people and communities, invite readers to consider the ways we find worth and enjoyment in ourselves and each other.
Overall, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a lovely next chapter in the Monk and Robot series, with very little action, but a lot of satisfaction.
