Scan barcode
A review by tasharobinson
The Harbors of the Sun by Martha Wells
4.0
What an odd place to end this series! This installment pays off the seemingly endless setup of the last book, and it's much more engaging throughout, with obvious higher stakes and big, significant developments. But the bigger and more crowded this world gets, the more I want to go back to the earlier days, where we were just tracking a few key characters and were tightly tied to their POVs. I wound up missing the characters we'd gotten close to more than I appreciated the many, many new ones.
It's fascinating how, after the world-changing action of this novel ends, there's still so much drama that could so clearly be solved by a few characters talking to each other, and how instead, they all stridently avoid those conversations. This is the first time these books have really reminded me of where I started with Martha Wells, with the Murderbot books — that protagonist would certainly recognize this urge to not deal with emotions, and the feeling that emotions are a much bigger crisis than anything else. Still, odd ending!
It's fascinating how, after the world-changing action of this novel ends, there's still so much drama that could so clearly be solved by a few characters talking to each other, and how instead, they all stridently avoid those conversations. This is the first time these books have really reminded me of where I started with Martha Wells, with the Murderbot books — that protagonist would certainly recognize this urge to not deal with emotions, and the feeling that emotions are a much bigger crisis than anything else. Still, odd ending!