The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

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Maybe it’s me.

I can see that there’s a good set up for a story here and the story itself is not without incident. A young woman running away joins the misfit crew of a space tunnelling ship. Without a doubt there’s a good mix of intriguing characters and their inter-relations do head to unexpected places. A lot of thought has gone into imagining what life for this crew would be like. There’s both grandeur and bathos in their journeys through space, and even an arc which reaches for the tragic.

Yet my main emotional response was boredom.

Perhaps the book is a hundred pages too long and so the story unfolds at too languid a pace for my liking; or possibly the characters are intriguing without ever becoming involving; or maybe I wasn’t in the mood for a book that seems to take place to the side of a space opera, rather than at the centre.

Whatever the reason, I’m quite prepared to take the blame and say it was me – because as much as I can objectively see that there’s a lot of good things in these pages, me and THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET just totally failed to click.