I read Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy last year (two short novellas comprising the Monk & Robot series) and loved them, so her earlier Wayfarers series, starting with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet has been on my to-be-read list for a while.
We join the crew of the Wayfarer, a spaceship that’s on a job to travel to a far-off destination and essentially drop an anchor point for a wormhole to make future travel easier (there’s a lot more science-fiction-y description in the book, but that’s the basics of it). Our introduction to the crew is Rosemary Harper, a young Martian woman who is obviously trying to outrun the circumstances of her past, but it’s really more of an ensemble story, with each crew member dealing with their own issues on various stops along the way.
I’m always a bit hesitant with stories that can be described as “cozy” (which I frequently have heard from people about this book) — sometimes I like them, but sometimes they cross into twee territory, and I can find them ungenuine. I’m happy to report, this wasn’t the case here! Yes, the plot itself is rather thin, but this is a great character-driven story. About half of the crew are aliens, and Chambers’ is really skilled at developing different cultures that appear very alien but are also very believable. I also appreciated that, while most of the characters are good people who mostly want to do the right thing, there are still interesting conflicts between them.
I didn’t like this quite as much as the Monk & Robot series (it did drag on a little at times, and the ending felt rather abrupt), but it was still a good read and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.