This is one of those books that I close after finishing and stare off into the middle distance for a solid ten minutes, just… processing.

I feel like I should have a bunch of really thoughtful reactions to this story, since there’s obviously so much going on thematically, but more than anything I just feel like my brain is stuck on the buffering screen, lol.

I loved the premise—an enormous space vessel acting as a sort of Noah’s ark, harboring a human population fleeing earth in search of the proverbial promised land. I appreciated the autistic, intersex, trans/non-binary, and asexual representation, as well as the allegorical interpretation of the antebellum south.

I struggled a little bit with some of the dense “science-y” terminology and just ended up skimming a lot of it, assuming I’d be able to get the gist. I had a similar issue when I tried to visualize some of the things described (in particular, the fields where lowerdeck workers harvest crops). The only other thing that threw me off sometimes was the quick jumps around through time, and not being able to sure when a “flashback” is being described and at what point have we jumped to the present again.

Other than that I really enjoyed this book, especially the second half. It’s beautifully-written, and the characters are nuanced and richly crafted.