4.5 stars (whether that gets rounded up or down will probably be determined as I write this review - so here goes)

Providence makes perfect use of a small cast of characters who have very little in common apart from the fact that they're stuck together in the same place for long stretches of time. And all of them think the other three are less important than they are - in the grand scheme of things. But I guess you have to be a bit of a narcissist to sign on to four years inside a giant, alien-destroying supercomputer.

The way the characters interacted kind of reminds me of Annihilation - in that there's just such a disconnect between each character's understanding of what's going on. But Gilly and Beanfield make the perfect travel narrators, one talking mostly about the ship and the "science" and the other talking about the people and all the things that no one else knows. For the first half of the book, Jackson was an enigma and I hated Anders (but I think both of those are very relevant because that's how Gilly and Banfield feel about them). But when the dynamic shifts and suddenly it's Anders and Jackson leading the narrative (but mostly Anders - Jackson filled in some backstory in a bit of a jarring infodump chapter and then got one chapter of actual action) and I found myself appreciating them more.

Throughout the book, I was waiting for the "gotcha" - the Ender's Game twist (this really made me think of Ender's Game but with adults, at least at the beginning, but I hated that book and absolutely did NOT hate this one, so). I kept thinking "oh maybe this will be the explanation" but then the suspense would keep dragging out. And suddenly, we were at 95% and the answer came, and I could really feel what the characters were feeling in that moment.

The book loops back brilliantly to the narrative of performance - and the ending just felt so fitting, even if the characters don't necessarily get the conclusion I would think they deserved. This was almost better because it felt more... Real?

There were some weird parts in the third act, parts where one of the characters didn't feel "in-character" anymore. Parts where, to draw attention to the long passage of time, there's not a whole lot going on that isn't relegated to the inside of the narrator's head. But there's still that undercurrent of suspense: does the AI really have their best interests at its core? and can they win a war against an alien enemy that's always learning and seems to have infinite numbers? and why is this war really happening?

What's cool is that we get answers to all of these things - even if they're not necessarily the answers the characters might have wanted.

{Thank you Putnam and NetGalley for the advanced review copy!}