Reviews with content warning for Blood - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

I loved this book! It's super fun, thoughtful, and enjoyable. I found it to be a really great mix of adventure/plot, philosophical questions, and queer found family. It's a page-turner with a lot of heart, and I definitely want to keep reading the rest of the series.

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thetainaship's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny lighthearted relaxing medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? Yes

3.5

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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emotional reflective

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is a really hard book to review, because despite what the back cover makes it sound like, Rosemary isn't the main character. The story starts with her, but each member of the Wayfarer crew is a protagonist. This isn't so much a story about Rosemary as much as a story about the people of the Wayfarer as individuals and a group.

Third-person omniscient perspective is hard to do, and either it was done poorly (which again, it's hard, and I don't blame Becky Chambers if she just didn't get it right) or it wasn't going for third-person omniscient and I just got confused by perspective jumps. It also skips through time a fair bit, too, glossing over days and sometimes months with little to mark it, leaving me occasionally confused. But those are overall minor problems, and didn't take too much away from my enjoyment of the book.

The story starts with Rosemary, a girl running from her past and looking to get as far away as possible from her old life on Mars, joining the crew on the Wayfarer. She joins a delightful crew already there - Ashby, Kizzy, Jenks, Sissix, Dr Chef, Corbin, Ohan, and Lovelace the AI. All of them are well-developed and interesting, with unique personalities and backstories, and for the most part are people I would love to spend time with myself.

This is not a plot-driven book. In fact, up until the end there isn't a whole lot of a plot. The Wayfarer takes a long-haul job that requires them to spend nine months traveling to a place that was until very recently a war zone, and this book is almost entirely these characters on this nine-month trip - interacting with each other, stopping off at occasional planets to get more supplies, occasionally meeting interesting people but mostly just being together. It's heavy on the world-building and more than anything is a wonderful, sweet story of found family.

If you go into this expecting a rip-roarin' scifi adventure, you're going to be disappointed. Because that's not what this book is. The world is stunning, but it's not even about the science fiction. It's a sweet, simple story of love and found family and choosing the people you are close to, and it just happens to be set on a wormhole-making spaceship in a spacefaring world and some members of this found family just happen to be aliens. There's plenty of scifi to satisfy a scifi fan, but at the core are emotions. If you go in expecting that, you won't be disappointed.

My only real disappointment is that the Wayfarers series is a bunch of standalone novels in the same world, so this is the only book where I'll get to enjoy these particular friends. I might try reading one of the other books (number three looks most interesting at the moment), but regardless if I pick up any of the rest of the series, I still consider this book to be absolutely stellar (pun intended).

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