This was a good one! I definitely like the ensemble/school books in this series better than the door ones. They’re more fun and less moralistic. Loved revisiting Kade and Sumi and Christopher and even Cora. Kade deserves his own book! And Jack and Jill (and Alexis) and the Moors are super fascinating, so it was nice to revisit and resolve that whole arc. 

I’ve heard mixed things about the next two books in the series, so I might wait for book eight to come out before I read any further.

Was this book perfect? Absolutely not. But I enjoyed it so much.

What I liked:

Critiques and misc observations:

I read most of this book in April and then didn’t finish it till July due to my Libby hold getting returned when I was at like 85%.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is fun and cozy and extremely episodic. There is a main plot, but it’s very secondary to all of the character-driven short adventures.

The crew of the Wayfarer was diverse and fascinating and (mostly) lovable. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I really enjoyed all of their individual little side quests.

This book has a sapphic relationship between a human and an alien, which is always fun. 

I think Becky Chambers is amazing at sci-fi worldbuilding. She’s so clearly informed by real-world biology and anthropology, and she uses that knowledge to create fascinating and varied alien species.

I didn’t love it all, though. I thought the approach to gender was weirdly limited. All of these alien species with all of these different sorts of family structures, and ALL of them had some sort of binary male/female split, both biologically and socially? Absolutely not. I’m hoping that gets interrogated some in future books.

Also I totally thought Rosemary was trans until her actual reason for changing her name was revealed. I liked that plotline too, but she’s still trans in my head.

My feelings about this book are definitely complicated.

There were a lot of things that I liked. The dialogue was fun. Wyatt’s narrative voice was incredibly entertaining (though I can definitely see why some readers wouldn’t like it). Every scene that was just characters hanging out and bantering was extremely enjoyable. 

I loved several of the side characters, especially Briar (though I’m not sure how I feel about the twist regarding her character, even though it was totally unsurprising). 

The politics and the ruminations on oppression were interesting, but more on that later.

But then there were a LOT of things that didn’t work for me. Here is the list, in no particular order:

Anyway, I guess I’d recommend this book if you’re looking for YA low fantasy with a soft magic system and a trans main character. It does those things well. It just also has a lot of issues.

Not my favorite in this series, but I still very much enjoyed it. Fantastic worldbuilding. Lundy was a really interesting main character. Not gay enough, especially compared to the other books in the series, but still some really cool reflections on gender and childhood. And props to Seanan McGuire for (as far as I can tell) managing to avoid antisemitism in her goblin market retelling!

I sometimes find it hard to write reviews of books that I loved, and I REALLY loved this one.

Light from Uncommon Stars is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. It seamlessly mixes aliens, donuts, music, Southern California, and deals with hell into a story about family and identity and trans self-acceptance. None of the pieces of this story should work together, and yet all of them do.

I loved Shizuka and Lan’s angsty but ultimately sweet and straightforward relationship. I loved the explorations of family legacy and gendered generational trauma and how easily parents can hurt their children without even knowing it.

Olive Garden played a weirdly important role in this book?

All of this makes Light from Uncommon Stars sound sweet and bizarre and cozy and comforting, and it is all of those things. It’s also extremely heavy. One of the main characters, Katrina Nguyen, is a trans teenage girl who runs away from home and gets caught up in the schemes of violin teacher Shizuka Satomi, the Queen of Hell. Katrina deals with a LOT of transphobia in this book, from misgendering to actual physical violence, and her gender dysphoria is also described pretty graphically. 

I would not consider this an easy read, so please make sure you can handle the content, particularly the transphobia, if you’re going to read it, but this book is absolutely a new favorite for me, and I highly, HIGHLY recommended it.

I think this was too short for me to get much out of it. Or maybe I just read it too quickly. I don’t know. It was fine.

This book is dark, and it is complicated. It picks up where The Poppy War left off and continues to explore power, addiction, and the horrors of war.

The politics of this book are wonderfully complex. There are multiple different political factions, and they are all at odds with each other in different ways. Daji, Vaisra, and the Hesperians are a fascinating triad of competing villains. R. F. Kuang’s skill at depicting the horrors of war and of religious colonization is unmatched.

No scene in The Dragon Republic matches the utter horror of the massacre at Golyn Niis in The Poppy War, but this book simply never lets up on the way that it discusses and shows atrocities. You will not have a single moment while reading this book where you feel good about anything.

The pieces of the story didn’t fit together quite as well as in the first one. I think it’s just a second-book problem, but there were a few too many moving parts.

People who recommend this series for the “romance” are vile and irresponsible. The relationship between Rin and Nezha is tortured and complicated and deeply compelling. It is one of the most fascinatingly toxic relationships I’ve ever encountered. But it is less than a subplot, and if you go into these books expecting romance, you will be much worse than disappointed.

I’m probably going to need to wait another three months before I read book three.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I loved all of the vampire lore, especially the different vampire races. 

The setting was great, too. Silvia Moreno-Garcia did a great job of creating a version of Mexico City that feels contemporary and real but with added dystopian elements including more cops, more surveillance, and more disease.

I loved Atl as a main character. She was flawed and complicated and interesting. She was casually queer. I would absolutely read another book focused on her family.

 Unfortunately, I liked the other characters a lot less, and I felt like the number of points of view in this relatively short book made all of their backstories feel very surface-level and underdeveloped. I get that this book was more plot-driven and that focusing more on backstory might have messed with the pacing, but I still don’t feel like I got to know the characters as well as I should have.

The action scenes were fine. Kind of hard to pay attention to. 

Why have I seen no one talk about the fact that this book has a relationship between an adult vampire and a human minor? Is Domingo not stated to be seventeen? Am I missing something? Cause that was super weird to me. I liked the inversion in the usual power dynamics in that relationship, but WHY was Domingo a minor? He could have been eighteen!

I listened to the audiobook version that was narrated by a man, and I can’t say I recommend it. He repeatedly mispronounced pretty basic Spanish words, and I cringed every time. I definitely would have liked the book more with a different narrator.

Of the three Kazuo Ishiguro books I’ve read, this is the only one with anything resembling a happy ending. It was also emotionally devastating, and I may be recovering from it for some time.

This book has so many conceptual layers, and I’m not sure I understand any of them. I may need to read some analyses to feel like I really get all of what was going on.

If you’re looking for a weird, sweet, high-concept novel with a fascinating AI narrator who is equal parts intelligent and naive, I highly recommend Klara and the Sun. If sick kids or artificial intelligence or genetic enhancement are triggers for you, you might want to give it a miss.

Honestly, I kind of feel like this book exists in the same conceptual space as Never Let Me Go, so I will definitely be thinking about potential links between the two for a while.