A review by laurareads87
Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

adventurous challenging dark emotional fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

Shards of Earth is an epic space opera that follows the multi-species crew of a run down patched together salvage ship who find themselves at the centre of interplanetary political manoeuvring with the spectre of a second war with the planet-destroying Architects – moon sized entities humans know almost nothing about, but which destroyed Earth – looming. 
There are a lot of things that I like about Shards of Earth that would lead me to recommend it to fans of space operas. Tchaikovsky has managed to develop a cast of characters of multiple different species – several of which are far from humanoid – while giving them distinct personalities, avoiding reducing each to a kind of representation of their respective species. Though a little bit slow at the beginning (for perhaps the first 15% or so), the plot moves along at a good pace overall, kept me interested throughout, and contained a few twists I did not see coming. Finally, with Shards of Earth Tchaikovsky has constructed a complex world with many societies, colonies, and alien species; the political and historical dynamics are very well developed without too many detours into ‘info dumping’ explanations. 
The book includes indexes of characters, worlds, species, and ships, as well as a timeline for reference – while I appreciate these inclusions, I did not find that I needed them to follow what was going on. I can see them being very useful to revisit before reading the next book in the series as a refresher: this was my first book by Adrian Tchaikovsky but won’t be my last – I’m glad that this is the first book in a series because I’ll happily read the rest (though it’s worth mentioning for those not necessarily wanting to start a long series that this novel works quite well as a standalone – it left me wanting to read more, but not unsatisfied with how it ended). 
 A minor complaint from a technical standpoint is that I’d prefer if the chapters were shorter for the e-book especially – having only 5 parts plus a prologue in a book this long is not my personal preference when it comes to navigating an e-book table of contents, though these chapters are broken up with line breaks and shifts in perspective that form convenient spots to pause reading if needed. 
 Thank you to Orbit Books + Netgalley for providing me with an ARC.

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