“All you can do, Rosemary – all any of us can do – is work to be something positive instead. That is a choice that every sapient must make every day of their life. The universe is what we make of it. It’s up to you to decide what part you will play.”

Rosemary Harper is the latest crew member of the multi-species tunneling ship, the Wayfarer. She's fled into space from the human settlement on Mars to escape a past she'd rather not think about, but she doesn't expect to find a new family, and learn more about herself and the universe around her. When the crew gets a once in a lifetime job, a job that can finally elevate the Wayfarer into higher end tunneling jobs, the crew are faced with hard decisions, dangerous encounters, and one of the toughest fights of their lives.

A lot of the books I've read recently have burned hot and fast, bright and loud explosions of story and plot and characters. The Long Way is more like a slow burn of a cozy fireplace keeping you warm through a long night. It's a story that rises and sinks slowly, explains and explores in extreme detail as the crew moves closer to their faraway goal. The story meanders along a long route of varying planets filled with a myriad of species, ones both unlike and like humans, and we learn a lot about the people and places that make up the world that Rosemary inhabits.

To be honest, this books is about 50% world building, 45% characters, and a measly 5% plot. Things happen, it's not just a slice of life that leads to nowhere, but it's purely the background noise driving the reader's exploration of the crew and the universe. Because of that, you really need to go in with very different expectations than you would for most other books. This book really isn't about the action of a space tunneling crew at all, it's more about creating a vast and diverse space and the exploration of the characters that live in it. I loved it because of that, it was just the chill, relaxing book I needed in the final days of summer, but I could also see myself growing bored with it in a different time and place. It's an excellent book to wind down with.

It was also just an extraordinarily beautiful book to me. Both the descriptions of space and the characters were amazing to read but I also just loved the diversity of the species and universe. Every single thing was well thought through and also explained, and it wasn't just a bunch of aliens that were practically just humans but different. There was an extreme attention to detail in the constructing of each species and their societies, from their norms to their love lives to their genders. It was like [b:Honor Among Thieves|30129657|Honor Among Thieves (The Honors, #1)|Rachel Caine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498066244l/30129657._SY75_.jpg|50559346] in this sense, a science fiction that I very openly recommend to literally everyone. It actually puts some work into designing each species based on where they came from, how they've grown, and the conflicts that have shaped them.

My favorite thing definitely has to be the characters though. I got so attached to this crew so quickly, from Rosemary, the young clerk who's new to everything space, to Sissix, the non-human pilot that brings an entirely new world view to the ship. You also had an AI, Lovelace, that pushed the boundaries of what we (and the world in the book) consider sapient, and loves that transcend the bounds of species, gender, and even space. There were just so many beautiful moments between the crew, from the backgrounds we slowly learn about to the stories they write together.

Overall, I absolutely loved this book, and I cannot wait to continue reading this series.