I love a good "found family in space" story, and everyone I know has been recommending me this one, so I finally caved and picked it up. Because of how highly praised it was, I was worried it wouldn't live up to my expectations, but I ended up enjoying it a ton.

The worldbuilding is fantastic - alien designs that are nothing like humans (rather than the oft-seen "human lite"), interstellar politics, the way different people and species RESPOND to those politics; all of it was well thought out and thoroughly explored, and managed not to bore me.

Then there's our motley crew itself; in many books with ensemble casts, characters often fade into the background and start to sound like each other, but here, everyone stood out. AND they all grew on me as the story progressed. I wish we'd gotten to spend more time with them, if anything. I'd have loved to see more interactions between group members we didn't really see talk to each other; for example,

more "sympathy points" for Corbin so that his whole thing with Ohan felt more divisive to us than it did

would have been nice. Rosemary's

reveal, too, felt almost anticlimactic, especially since for everyone except Jenks, it happened off-screen.

Still, I thought it was really inventive how many of the climaxes/crises/huge plot points took place off-screen; this story does not pretend to be a drama. If anything, it's a character study, and I found that fascinating, once I got used to this narrative style.

All in all, I've read better books this year, I've even read better books by Becky Chambers (see: the Monk and Robot duology), but something about this story and these characters really appealed to me nonetheless. It reminds me of other "found family in space" stories - The Murderbot Diaries series, Star Trek, the Wolf 359 podcast, Тайна Третьей Планеты, and more I can't think of right now - in all the best ways. Picking up the sequel as soon as I can!