Surprisingly difficult to connect with.
This is still a well written, interesting, continues the Wayfarer universe and prompts some challenging thoughts.
Where I did struggle was connection with the characters. Because they're exclusively alien, and entirely so: 4 arms and a shell, tiny sloth like swinging creatures, Laru fur-ball bendy things (though I imagined the creature from Ice Age oddly enough), because they're hard to visualise in my head I found it harder to connect to the characters.
I do also suspect this is a way of putting the reader in a position of a minority, to be unable to recognise oneself amongst the peers, which is what kept flipping back and forth in my head whilst continuing with the tale.
As with other Becky Chambers' books, the story isn't some fantastical explosion of events, but a soft observation of life and interaction of species and races living together - and that's something I'll continue to love about their books.
My favourite is still the first book, I'm not sure anything is going to top that for many years, but this is still a solid entry into the Wayfarer world.
10 Highlight(s)
He thought briefly about bolting the remainder of his meal, but eating food without savouring it was almost as bad as throwing it out.
and shuttles that appeared held together with nothing more than a welding torch and hope.
he was aware that he had done this countless times and had nothing to worry about. Still, the visual of an entire planet rushing toward you was a hard thing to tell your body to ignore.
But possessing the intellectual knowledge that infrastructure can break was a far cry from watching it break in real time. He didn't know what to do with that.
'Things just happen,' Pei said kindly. 'All the rest of us can do is react. And do our best.'
perhaps I'm not viewing it in the proper context. My peers would argue your situation and ours boil down to the same principle, but then, they're wrong about most things.'
But for all the strategising, for all the narrow escapes and near misses, when you boiled it down, war was nothing more than an argument in which no one had landed on a better solution than killing each other.
Aeluon culture, a mother was not a parent. Parents were men and shon. Parents went to school for it. Parents were the people who actually raised children, not those who had done the easy business of creating them.
'It's all right,' Speaker said. 'You've never met one of me before.' 'True, but that's a reason, not an excuse.'
'Because I didn't want to,' Speaker said simply. 'But why?' 'Because I didn't want to. And when it comes to a person's body, that is all the reason there ever needs to be.
Others I've read in the "Wayfarers" series: