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

adventurous informative inspiring reflective medium-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? No

3.5

This was a nice cozy read and i had fun. (I mostly used it as a palate cleanser for whenever Lolita made me too angry to continue reading.)That said the plot is very meandering. Every chapter is like ah yes, here is a new sci fi worldbuilding thing and the resulting interesting moral question to contemplate. And then the book does not dig into those at all, it just comes up with a convenient solution if necessary and moves on.
For example, the protagonist is a runaway who is lying about her identity because her dad did some war crimes. And when this comes out the crew are like well, did you also do war crimes? No? Okay neat we don't care then. Which is boring! Where's the conflict? What if instead she did know or suspect? What if she was involved? Or even what if someone in the crew judged her anyway?

This kind of tease at something that could be an interesting thing to engage with happens at least a dozen times and it is never actually engaged with by the story or characters. 
I also thought it was kind of bizarre how gender is portrayed. The gender binary is still a normal thing across species even for the species that explicitly can change between sexes? Everyone is male or female, even all the AIs. I don't think that in the sci fi future cis people won't exist anymore but even in 2014 people had heard of non-binary identities and i would have liked to see some of that in this story too.
I did like the characters well enough and the alien and future human lore was fun and interesting to learn about.
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