From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)

Becky Chambers

Start date: June 1, 2024

Finish date: June 30, 2024

Discussion: Current Monthly Group Read

Why we're reading this: Monthly Group Read for June 2024 (set in space)

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Monthly Group Read for July 2019 (set in spa…more
[close] Monthly Group Read for June 2024 (set in space)

previously ...
Monthly Group Read for July 2019 (set in space)

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Current Monthly Group Read

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What Members Thought

Jun 13, 2021 Amanda rated it really liked it

Shelves: in-media-res, older-generation, pov-multiple, futuristics, fiction, format-audible, spirituality, 4-stars, lgbt, friend-s-recs

Summer 2021 (June);
Sarah's Book Club - June
F Bingo Board - Novel by a Debut Writer

I'm glad that I was not hearing about this story at the time so many of my friends did and so I got to go into this story with no allusions or connections to Star Trek or Firefly, which I feel aren't that great a comparisons learning about these three in a ven diagram of each other after the fact. If I'd know this definitely would have ended up in the overhyped box, but as I didn't and it didn't, I was free to enj Summer 2021 (June);
Sarah's Book Club - June
F Bingo Board - Novel by a Debut Writer

I'm glad that I was not hearing about this story at the time so many of my friends did and so I got to go into this story with no allusions or connections to Star Trek or Firefly, which I feel aren't that great a comparisons learning about these three in a ven diagram of each other after the fact. If I'd know this definitely would have ended up in the overhyped box, but as I didn't and it didn't, I was free to enjoy this book on the merits of simply being just another take on a multicultural, scifi space setting in the far future (like thousands of other scifi stories which match up similarly).

I rather liked that this book wasn't about the tension and race to get somewhere, do something, go, go, go. It takes a few chapters but you realize incredibly early on in the books that is isn't going to be about that. This is a character study of the people on this one ship, in this one universe, about all their different backgrounds, species, plants, interconnections, differences and similarities that brought them to this moment, this team, this family. I appreciate this utterly different change of pace you don't find very often in scifi.

While I did feel like I needed a chart to be able to remember the differences in races sometimes, I feel like my struggle with that pointed out how similar the base line of humanity is right now, and how much we choose not to juggle about even the other people on our own planet, no less the differences of hundreds and thousands of other species across a galaxy. I liked the struggle and the points I could see being shown off behind that struggle, with the writing specifically telling you that.

In some different ways, I ended up attached to all the characters (though, for certain, serious, and from beginning to end, my favorite was Lovey). There were definitely moments throughout the last fourth where I tears up over several things (Corbin, of course; where Rosemary & Sissix end up; and Lovey, my soul for Lovey, where I did start crying even in my car in public). I'm curious about the next novel, so maybe this will go on my list of series to delve into sometime in the future.
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