Title: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Series: Wayfarers #1
Author: Becky Chambers
Genre: Space Opera
Trigger Warnings: Death, violence, grief, xenophobia, war, genocide, drug use (mild), terminal illness, sexual content (discussed/implied but no on-page sex), blood, abelism, imprisonment, injury, trauma/PTSD-like symptoms
Back Cover:
Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.
Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.
Review:
This is a really hard book to review, because despite what the back cover makes it sound like, Rosemary isn’t the main character. The story starts with her, but each member of the Wayfarer crew is a protagonist. This isn’t so much a story about Rosemary as much as a story about the people of the Wayfarer as individuals and a group.
Third-person omniscient perspective is hard to do, and either it was done poorly (which again, it’s hard, and I don’t blame Becky Chambers if she just didn’t get it right) or it wasn’t going for third-person omniscient and I just got confused by perspective jumps. It also skips through time a fair bit, too, glossing over days and sometimes months with little to mark it, leaving me occasionally confused. But those are overall minor problems, and didn’t take too much away from my enjoyment of the book.
The story starts with Rosemary, a girl running from her past and looking to get as far away as possible from her old life on Mars, joining the crew on the Wayfarer. She joins a delightful crew already there – Ashby, Kizzy, Jenks, Sissix, Dr Chef, Corbin, Ohan, and Lovelace the AI. All of them are well-developed and interesting, with unique personalities and backstories, and for the most part are people I would love to spend time with myself.
This is not a plot-driven book. In fact, up until the end there isn’t a whole lot of a plot. The Wayfarer takes a long-haul job that requires them to spend nine months traveling to a place that was until very recently a war zone, and this book is almost entirely these characters on this nine-month trip – interacting with each other, stopping off at occasional planets to get more supplies, occasionally meeting interesting people but mostly just being together. It’s heavy on the world-building and more than anything is a wonderful, sweet story of found family.
If you go into this expecting a rip-roarin’ scifi adventure, you’re going to be disappointed. Because that’s not what this book is. The world is stunning, but it’s not even about the science fiction. It’s a sweet, simple story of love and found family and choosing the people you are close to, and it just happens to be set on a wormhole-making spaceship in a spacefaring world and some members of this found family just happen to be aliens. There’s plenty of scifi to satisfy a scifi fan, but at the core are emotions. If you go in expecting that, you won’t be disappointed.
My only real disappointment is that the Wayfarers series is a bunch of standalone novels in the same world, so this is the only book where I’ll get to enjoy these particular friends. I might try reading one of the other books (number three looks most interesting at the moment), but regardless if I pick up any of the rest of the series, I still consider this book to be absolutely stellar (pun intended).
The Wayfarers series:
- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
- A Closed and Common Orbit
- Record of a Spaceborn Few
- The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
Bluejay Reads 