booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET is about a ship, a crew, a space journey, and the friends they made and (or sometimes tragically lost) along the way.

There are a lot of characters and they generally feel distinct from each other. That means I can't really point to an overall style, other than that once I tracked names enough to tell Jenks and Ashby apart I did all right for the rest of the book (I kept mixing up who was with Pei).
main character - If anyone is the main character it might be Rosemary, she's definitely the reader's way into the narrative as a human who doesn't have any travel experience and is generally unfamiliar with the people and places that they encounter on the way. Because she isn't the only point-of-view character there's a pretty robust diversity not only of perspectives but of angles for explanation.

The ship has a relatively small crew but it's enough to make a character relationship web complicated pretty quickly. Ashby is the captain, which means he doesn't pal around with the crew much but still is close to most of them. I like his relationship with Pei, it's nice to see a long-distance thing portrayed well. Jenks and Kizzy have a friendly working relationship and a great rapport. They get along even when they're getting on each other's nerves, which is good since they're generally working on ship maintenance together. Sissix is my favorite, and I like how she is with Rosemary, especially towards the end. There's even more crew and I'm very bad with names, so that's about my limit of what I can remember and say without spoilers. Generally speaking I like the way that non-human characters have conversations and relationships with each other that don't have anything to do with the human ones. It helps reinforce the feeling of a galaxy that isn't centered on humans, which is definitely a welcome departure from a lot of space sci-fi.

Most of the worldbuilding in terms of physical spaces is focused on the ship, with a few visits to other worlds on the way. Where it shines is in establishing the impression of a full galaxy with complicated dynamics of which we're just getting a tiny slice. I love the descriptions of various aliens, and the way the characters make a specific effort to understand other perspectives and ways of being.

For the first half of the book I was lukewarm, having trouble getting into it but having a good enough time to continue. It more than paid off in the second half, wow. There are a lot of important characters by virtue of paying attention to the entire crew plus a few additional people. Because the big thing that's happening is they're traveling a very long way to a specific destination, plus some stops and occasional complications along the way, most of the plot revolves around developing and continuing relationships between the characters. The main journey is to slowly travel to somewhere very far away for a specific reason, and then because of the tech involved they'll be able to get home very quickly. It makes the ending feel climactic even though technically all they did was go a long way away and then come right back to where they started in a fraction of the time.

The ending is devastating. The emotional culmination of getting to know these characters runs into the dangers of their journey in a way that is sudden, frightening, and grief-stricken. If you like found-family journey stories (especially ones in space), don't miss this one.

Santiago is a shepherd who has a dream and travels to Egypt on the basis of that dream. He processing the world through the idea that everyone has a "Personal Legend" that must be fulfilled, a concept that is both insightful and useless. It's mostly wielded to explain bad things by saying someone must not be taking actions in alignment with their Personal Legend, and that good things are from pursuing it. 

I am reading a translation, so it’s possible that it’s more dazzling in the original language, but the version I’m reading is flat and boring. People think things, do things, then think about how they did things. It’s plodding and just shy of dull, I only finished it because I’m reading it for a book club. 

Santiago is boring and insipid. I don't like him, neither as a character nor as a narrator. Santiago gets to know a few people but the descriptions of them are simple, categorical, and frequently xenophobic. He spends the longest with the crystal merchant, and that was the best section of the book. His interactions with women are flat and centered around his idea of them in a way that was off-putting for me. 

I’m not sure how much worldbuilding was actually accomplished, and how much the book relied on me as a reader to know, for example, where Andulsia (in Spain) is in relation to Egypt. It uses the real world for its setting and relies on Biblical references for its fantastical elements, exploring new places through the naïve gaze of its protagonist. 

The ending is so breathtakingly simple that I don’t know whether to applaud or be upset. It’s a journey story, which normally I would like, but this just didn't appeal to me at all.

The book opens with a plot-relevant rape scene and I realized I can’t handle that right now.

RIPPED AWAY features a boy who finds himself in Victorian London during the Ripper murders, working with his crush who's also there, to try and get them both back home.

Abe’s main traits are that he doesn’t want to be here (which is understandable), he’s shy, and likes Mitzy. Abe and Mitzy have an unequal relationship because Mitzy is in the body of a blind girl and therefore her mama won’t let her do much of anything and he's her only way to exert any agency. It's hard to know whether the control exerted over her has a sexist component because the implication is that her blindness is more in the forefront of her mother's and uncle's minds than her gender is. Their relationship didn't necessarily have to be equal, but the book doesn't seem to examine the inequalities in the same way that it's taking the time to show and discuss the xenophobia and antisemitism.

The worldbuilding was pretty good for such a small book, it gave a sense of concrete things that Abe noticed which were different from his ordinary life. It felt pretty natural with very little infodumping. The plot revolves around trying to survive as Jewish kids in the wave of antisemitism and xenophobia which accompanied the Ripper murders, including trying to keep a Jewish man from being kept as a suspect due to an unrelated secret. It works overall, not trying to get very involved in the course of the murders but trying to hang on and figure out how their clues from the fortune teller relate to making it home. The actual murders are mostly important and a historical event that the reader might have heard of, they are not trying to figure out who did it or something like that. 

The way that ableism generally and Mitzy's blindness specifically is handled is my main qualm with the book and it is the reason I don't recommend it overall.

Because Mitzy is used to being sighted she feels very vulnerable in her new blindness in addition to having unwillingly travelled through time. This puts Abe in the position of being the only one who explores, who can venture outside alone, and ultimately Mitzy needs him in order to get him but he doesn't really need her. He has a crush on her and therefore wants to interact with her, but it feels like she literally doesn't have a choice of whether to work together. She has a mysterious backstory which turns out to involve a previous illness which seems to exist only as a point of speculation for him and isn't otherwise examined in the story. It serves to explain why she didn't interact with him and was trying to be a loner at school, but it seems strange to me for her to have no other friends and it exacerbated the feeling that he's desperate for her but she only interacts with him because the circumstances and her new disability have forced her to. Both kids make comments about how terrible it would be for her to be blind forever. I'm not saying it wouldn't be bad (especially as Jewish kids in Victorian London), but the way they discuss it makes it seem like they consider it to be a truly awful fate. This rankled me, especially when the entire reason Mitzy is blind is because she's inhabiting the body of a girl who is blind (Maya). It felt especially dismissive of the kids they seem to have swapped with, there wasn't even a discussion of what Maya's experience might be if she's temporarily sighted from swapping with Mitzy. Because Mitzy's blindness was caused by the time travel, the kids aren't sure whether she'll be able to see when or if they are able to get home. The book plays with this uncertainty by having Mitzy initially unable to see when she first returns, this lasts long enough for both kids to panic and think she's blind forever. When it turns out to be temporary and her sight returns it seals this as a magical-cure narrative, wherein a disability lasts only long enough to be inconvenient for the bold adventurer and then is banished.

I just couldn't get into this. I couldn't relate to the emotional tension for the main character because the system is clearly evil and it feels like she'll get to that conclusion eventually but not soon enough for me. It's fantasy with a pretty loosely described magic system and I prefer things more defined. 

NOPHEK GLOSS is about a boy growing up too fast and being shouldered with trauma and responsibility greater than can reasonably be comprehended, finding a new family along the way but not quite being able to trust that connections forged so rapidly can in fact be genuine and enduring… in space. 

I'm about to discuss how much I didn't like the main character so I'd like to stress that the book is so good that it held me despite not liking the main character until close to the end. The world is great, it deals with trauma in a way that is understandable even if it's not always the best decision (since an instinctual reaction to trauma is rarely the best one in the long run, but it is often relatable in the short term). 

The third person narration just follows Caiden (except in the epilogue), so every scene is necessarily filled with his voice. I don't like Caiden as a person for the most of the book. He's stubborn, hasty, and doesn't think things through. He thinks far enough to figure out whether the one outcome he desires might maybe happen and then he rushes towards it, only pausing later to figure out whether he might have tried something else. Even once he's talked through what to do with someone, he'll get stressed, scared, or just talk to another person and then change his mind, taking drastic action without talking to anyone about the change. All of this completely makes sense with his background and current circumstances in that way that means if he acted less hastily or more reasonably he would make less sense overall and be poorly-suited for his world. He's a teenager who makes a series of decisions early in the book that make his body and mind more capable without catching up his emotional processing to match. It's a neat narrative trick, as it allows for literally childish decisions to be made in his quest for revenge, driven by guilt and sorrow. 

At the end of NOPHEK GLOSS everything I just described and complained about with Caiden changes. He matures in a harrowing and tortuous few weeks which force him to reckon with his past in an awfully visceral way and then to use his relatively new adult cunning to actually try and think more than one move ahead in order to save everyone he loves who can still be saved. It’s an exhilarating sequence which forms the climax of the narrative and a large part of its catharsis. I like this version of Caiden a bit better as a person, but more importantly it’s a better version of him that fits with the emotional arc of the book and shows a kind of maturity, one that’s consistent with his past self. He’s still daring and reckless, but he shows the ability to channel that disregard for his own safety by waiting to be reckless until he can do the most good with his death-defying antics. 
character relationships - Caiden bonds into a found family with the crew very quickly, I would say too quickly except that there’s a narrative reason that it might have been sped up while still being a genuine connection. I like his rapport with En the best, they’re supportive of him while pushing him when they think he needs it, and they’re usually right. The crew are various kinds of sapient beings, and unless I missed something I think no more than two of them are human (possibly none of them are). They have interpersonal tangles which predate Caiden’s arrival, pulling him into a tangled but mostly friendly space even though he doesn’t initially get along with everyone. I appreciate how long it takes for him to get close to some of the crew, it helps them feel like their own beings and not just convenient plot devices.

This is definitely soft sci-fi, there are only a few specific concepts and technologies to keep track of with very few technical explanations. There’s a distinct sensibility as to how characters navigate the world, but the actual worldbuilding is shown instead of told. What is explained is how those technologies matter to the beings who use them, and what the stakes are if they are used in destructive ways. Caiden is an engineer, but there are almost no descriptions of what it’s like to fix the ship or do any engineering things. It fits well with the setup of travelling through multiverses, since Passagers really wouldn’t be intimately familiar with histories behind the breadth of technologies and tools potentially available to them. 

Almost half of the book is spent trying to navigate healing from major trauma in the first couple of chapters, and then the last quarter is spent using everything that happened to take on a lot more trauma with the goal of stopping even more. Caiden is traumatized, rescued, accelerated, then he escapes to try and fix it all but runs into the power of his enemy and the limitations of his uneasy ally before he gains the opportunity and necessity of enacting a dramatic rescue and last stand against a nearly invincible enemy. Emotionally and interpersonally, the focus is on how what Caiden most needed to heal was time and support, and he was so desperate to shortcut the first that he ended up running away from the second.