I’m still not quite sure if I enjoyed this book or not. It’s fine, but for the large majority of the book I just thought it was OK. I feel almost guilty for saying that, because the book is just so nice, but that’s kind of all that it is. Ironically, I’ve been saying that I want light and fluffy fiction, nothing too deep or heavy, and yet when presented with one of the lightest and fluffiest books I’ve come across in a long while […]
Yet another glowing review for this gem of a book.
I was going to give this four stars because I really enjoyed myself while reading it, but I didn’t get THAT FEELING, you know? But then I had this one thought afterwards that completely reshaped my perspective about the whole book and now I have to give it five stars. But first some context. This has been an absurdly well-reviewed book here at CBR (and everywhere else), and it pretty much came out of nowhere. It has been compared frequently to both Star Trek (because […]
Hey, look, we’re all different. Isn’t that swell?
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the somewhat unwieldy title to an absolutely delightful story of a tightly-knit group of space-farers tasked with tunneling through space, setting up wormholes that allow for interplanetary travel. It’s set in the distant future (obviously), where humanity has made Earth uninhabitable and are scattered across the cosmos. They’ve joined a collective of alien races called the Galactic Commons. That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell. The broad elements here will be familiar to anyone who’s been […]
Wildly different from the first book and yet still so good
Oh my God you guys this book was so good. Like many of y’all mentioned, it’s very different from the first book, which seemed like really well-written Firefly fanfiction (not a bad thing at all!). This book is much more tightly written, focusing on just a couple of characters rather than the large crew from the first book. I think someone else mentioned Margaret Atwood in their review of it and I absolutely agree. And that’s a huge compliment coming from me! At the end […]
A Fun Read Not Heavy on the Sci-Fi
Sometimes, a bookclub pick ends up really working well. This book was described to us as being like Firefly but I’m not really sure if I totally buy the comparison. But it was still enjoyable. The story begins with a young woman who is fleeing Mars and signs up to be a sort of secretary/translator to a working ship. The ship works by poking holes in space, creating wormholes, or something of that sort. I think they explain it in the book, but not in […]
It’s Not What You Think
I was looking for something fun, or rollicking. I remembered that I had seen a book advertised as “Firefly meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” That sounded like what I was looking for. It was and it wasn’t. I enjoyed it very much and I don’t want to go into the plot or even the characters much. You should be unspoiled for this book as much as possible. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a contemplative, character driven space opera. Earth […]