For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle

I will start this review by clarifying that this is a book of speeches. This is not a book that Thunberg sat down and wrote out and organized. It is compilation of her speeches and posts in chronological order. I've seen a few reviews saying it is boring, repetitive, and not well-written. I think the main reason it may come off this way is because of this format. It's pretty common to repeat the same basic information throughout speeches, especially data and statistics. So yes, the book gets a bit repetitive, but each speech is unique despite having the same message. I still enjoyed reading each of them.

Also, if you don't believe or care about climate change, I don't think this book alone will change that. If you're looking for writings to recommend to such people, I would suggest "Wherever I Go I Seem to Be Surrounded by Fairy Tales" and "We Are the Change and Change Is Coming" because I think those two synchronize most of the information presented in the book.

As someone who cares about the environment and is worried about reckless human impact, I thought these speeches were well-written and really got to the issue. You can see how Thunberg has developed over her year of speeches and I thought she very maturely handled criticism about her age or how she should be in school. She also writes well about how her Asperger's diagnosis influences the way she sees the issue. A remarkable book of speeches written by a remarkable young woman.

The subject matter is hard to deal with but Thunberg has done an excellent job tackling the issue.

"Strange Practice" is a unique exceptionally calm view of modern London's undead and non-human society under attack by (misled) murderous Christian Monks.

This is a book I had to acclimate to. The author writes in a calm, gentle, very normal way that's completely at odds with the weird things going on. At first, this created some distracting dissonance but, now that I've settled into it, I can see that it works.

This book is a fun read but I ended up sending the audiobook version back to Audible. The narrator sounded like she was doing a slightly below average sight-reading rather than a well-prepared narration. Her inappropriate stresses and mechanical managling of phrases distracted me.

Now I'm back on to listening to the voice in my head, whose making a much better job of the reading thing.

Greta Thunberg is the bomb.

I first heard about Greta when she began school striking last year, but only, at first, as a curiosity (on the part of the press).  It wasn't until her speech before the UK parliament that she got enough press that I was able to understand her story. When I read the speech in the Guardian, I was laughing - in the best way - at the sheer audacity, bravery, and brilliance, of a 16 year old standing before the august (HA!) body of British lawmakers and telling them that:

The UK is, however, very special.  Not only for its mind-blowing historical carbon debt, but also for its current, very creative, carbon accounting.

and:

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of mankind.

and my favorite:

Did you just hear what I said? Is my English okay? Is the microphone on? Because I'm beginning to wonder.

I handed the speech to MT and said You HAVE TO read this. It's written by a 16 year old Swedish girl whose first language isn't even English! (We who have lived our lives isolated on single language land masses - and yes, yes, Spanish, but it wasn't widespread when I was a kid - are always in awe of those of you who juggle multiple languages with ease, never mind speak it better than us natives.)  I've been a following her in the news ever since and I just admire the hell out of her.  I found this little collection of all her speeches up to and including her UK Parliament speech, on the bookstore counter, and snapped it up.  

It's nothing fancy; just a small booklet containing all 11 of her speeches through 23 April 2019, and if read cover to cover (which I don't recommend), it's repetitive.  But the message is powerful, and like it or not, it's dead-on accurate: our house is on fire; what we would never do to our own lawn, we're doing with impunity to the rest of the planet, and we're collectively living like a magic, 23rd-hour solution that will make everything ok again is going to miraculously fly out our asses.  

Greta is making waves because she's 16 and she's the only one willing to stand in front of entire governments and actually say, with only a tiny bit more tact: you're all idiots and you're the generation that will always be known as those idiots who destroyed civilisation as we know it.

On a more first-world-problem note: this wonderful 16 year old was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and even though she didn't win (and should have), I am still thankful I'm not a teen today.  Life is hard enough as an adolescent, but now teens are nominated for Nobels; getting into Yale or Oxford suddenly isn't the acme of teen achievement any more.  Yikes.