The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers [Family Reads]

Why we chose Becky Chamber’s A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

[I want this post OUT OF MY DRAFTS before the end of the year, so here it is in a rough state. We discussed this book back in March.]

Ash suggested this book because she thought it would be easy to get ahold of – lol it took us almost four months. It was on her TBR because people she knew liked it and the premise sounded fine… “Decent scifi? Okay *added to TBR*”. She didn’t have any strong feeings about it, whereas I had no interest whatsoever but no negative feelings. We were both aware that it’s a popular novel that’s been going strong for quite awhile now.

Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.

Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe. 

Goodreads

Our Discussion 💬

❗ This discussion is particularly spoiler filled. Read at your own risk. Skip to Final Thoughts for a spoiler-free overview.

Overhyped and Unexpected

We immediately agreed that A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet had been overhyped for us and was not as enjoyable as we hoped. When I asked Ash what kind of story she expected, she said a less episodic and more continuous one. I agreed that those episodes implied a lot of stuff, but I also prefer a more fluid, ongoing, continuously developing story – i.e. where one event has an impact on what happens next.

We don’t mind when narratives take time to focus on different characters. What we aren’t keen on is when an episode explores an aspect of a character and then it’s never mentioned again, has no impact on the story, etc. One glaring example is Rose’s crush on Sissix. This happens over and over throughout the book. We felt we had to make a lot of assumptions about what was going on in the background of the pages. There isn’t really an overarching story. We expected a space opera or at least a scifi epic. We got a collection of short stories loosey strung together.

The description on the back of the book definitely played a role in our disappointment. We agreed that it “should have left it at the white part!” However I can’t find a picture of the back copy of the edition we read so that’s all I can say about that, haha. I know it prompted us to opine about Rose. We could barely remember her name and thought she functioned as a cardboard stand in existing only to tie everyone together. So, the back description set us up for disappointment, we thought. 😛

Prepare yourself for further rambling in the next paragraphs.

We kept expecting more about Rosemary’s secret ‘dark’ past. And we might have been able to appreciate the book for what it is, a tiny small peaceful story, but we set ourselves up for disappointment because we expected more from the story. We had the wrong impression and the book was overhyped, so it was doomed to fail with us. It wasn’t until about 75% in that we sort of started to care about any of the characters, because the story gives you little drops about them and not enough to give you a full view of the characters. Ex. what’s the deal with Corbin, he’s grumpy for like two pages and then there’s a chapter where you find out he’s a clone and then he’s a bit nicer. Ohan as well could have been way more interesting given more page time.

Our discussion of the characters dissolved into some aggressive complaining, so I’ll leave it at that. A lot of our unimpressed experience could have been resolved with someone telling us this was cozy scifi before we started reading it, hah…

Haphazard Construction

It wasn’t just the story that fell short for us. Much of the dialogue felt stilted and amateur. I predicted the back and forth of an entire conversation (pg. 186). While some hints of worldbuidling intrigued us (sadly never to be developed further), there were also moments when the worldbuilding built to a point of irrevelance. Ex. why did we have to read multiple pages about soap?

Now, here’s something that may be truly controversial. We never bought into the whole AI thing. Sorry Jenks. IT’S JUST A MACHINE THAT HUMANS BUILT. Put your energy into caring about actual living beings…

If pressed, we can accept that this book was maybe trying to do something different with scifi. But for us, no thank-you. If we’re going to try scifi, we’ll take the typical stuff with worldbuilding and tunneling action and spacey goodness that makes a great adventure story.

Final Thoughts 💭

Ash and I both gave this book ★★½. We’re not sure how this book gained such a following. The little stories were decent enough on their own and if you want a cozy scifi, that’s what you get. But we wanted something different. A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet didn’t deliver what the worldbuilding hinted. The plot ended up having little impact and failed to bring all the elements together. So tl;dr – a cozy scifi novel and nothing more.

Further Reading 📰

🍂 Read an excerpt
🍂 Author website
🍂 Interview @ The Mary Sue
🍂 Reviews: Acqua @ Acquadimore, Nicky @ The Bibliophian, Sarah @ Sarah Ames-Foley
🍂 Related: Other sci-fi books that Ash and I have discussed for Family Reads include Jeff Vandermeer novel Borne and graphic novel The Wake.

What are some must-have elements in the scifi books you enjoy?