I was a bit iffy to begin with. But I think that was because I loved the characters & MC from A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and didn’t know this was a companion, so at the start I was disappointed.

But damn this book was good! Also such an amazing ending!
This one has two story lines which at first was a little confusing, but it all explains itself perfectly in the end!!

Also I love all the diversity we get not only in the different species but also in the humans. We have a human with a speech problem in this one. Also some of the species are very gender fluid. There is one that changes from male to female regularly. Which I have to be honest was a little confusing at the start until I figured it out. Then there is also some species that don’t identify as either gender and prefer ‘they’. It’s just such an amazing range of diversity but the best thing is, It is all completely normal! There is no hate of questioning. That’s just how life is. And it’s amazing. You would like to hope we are like that one day but I honestly don’t see it happening.

I can’t wait for book 3, which luckily I have an eARC of!!! I need to go read the synopsis to see if it says who it follows! I hope it’s someone we had met from this book or the first.

Also highly recommend the audiobook! It’s so well done!

Here is my Spoiler Free Review

You can also find this review on www.duskangelreads.com

*Throughout this whole review I will refer to the previous books in this series as ‘Book 1’ & ‘Book 2’ as the titles are just so long!
Book 1 = A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
Book2 = A Closed and Common Orbit

Okay, first off. I did receive an eARC of this book, however, I did not read the eARC, I waited for the audiobook to release and listened to that. I listened to the first two books in this series on audiobook & when I tried reading this book, it just didn’t feel right. So I waited 2 days and listened to the audiobook.

I highly recommend the audiobooks for this series! They are really well done and I enjoy them a lot. It also may make it easier to read via audiobook as this is a slower, very character driven series with not a tonne of huge plot points. So the audiobooks were awesome.

Next, I didn’t like this one as much as the first two books in the series. This series is made up of companion novels. So we follow different characters in each book. Book 1 followed the crew of a ship with the main character being a human woman. The next book follows an AI that we meet in book 1 and her adventures after the events of book 1. This book does not follow any of the characters we have met before and also takes place directly after book 1. So the events of Book 2 & Book 3 actually happened at the same time. Which I thought was interesting.

Writing:
As for why I didn’t like this one as much as the first two. I think the main thing is because this one follows multiple points of view. In Book 1 we follow 1 POV in Book 2 we follow 2 POV and in this one we follow 5 (well 6 actually but the 6th is actually a characters documentation of meeting with humans. It made it a little more difficult to connect with the characters. We still get to know them but I just didn’t have that same connection that I had with the MCs from Books 1 & 2.

I did enjoy that we got to meet another species up close in this book. We meet a Harmagian named Ghuh’loloan. So that was really interesting. In previous books, we met other species but hadn’t gotten to know a Harmagian before. I love how other species react to humans sometimes. It’s amusing as! In Book 2 another species (I can’t remember which it was) meets a human and the human cries and the other species freaks out. It was just hilarious.
All of the species in this book are so thought out and written so well that they feel real.

In this book we explore more of the human side of things and how they are living in space however many years after they had to leave earth. We also learn about some of the jobs and just how life runs there which was quite interesting.

Plot:
This one has very little plot to it. There is a rather big event that happens in the beginning and everything kind of stems from that. There are a couple other events that stem because of that event but the book is mostly about learning about the characters and their lives.

Because of the lack of plot, this book kinda stopped a little abruptly. I was just listening, looked down at my phone and realised I was on the last chapter. It still ended nicely but because there wasn’t a huge plot point and then a resolution and conclusion, it just didn’t feel like the end.

Characters:
I did enjoy all of our main characters. First, we have Isabel who works in the archives and lives with her Wife Tamsin. She is also the one that has the Harmagian, Ghug’loloan staying as a guest. I loved reading her interactions with Ghuh’loloan, there is a lot of sharing of info as the Ghuh’lolaon is very curious about the Exodans. I really enjoyed both Isabel & Ghuh’lolan & Tamsin too for that matter. Isabel is such a kind, intelligent person. Tamsin is a little more fun but also strong minded. I also just love Isabel & Tamsin together. They are an older couple but still go out and do ‘young people’ things together and have fun. Ghuh’lolan is really nice too and also amusing when it comes to interacting with other humans and things that humans see as normal.

Next is Tessa. Tessa is married to George & mum to Aya & Ky. Tessa is just living life, working and looking after her family, including her rather stubborn father. George is away for work so she is left to look after Ky & Aya. Ky is only 2, so he is very active and hilarious at excuses. Aya is I think around 6-8 I don’t remember and she is very strong-willed. Tessa is an interesting character but probably my least favourite out of the MCs. Just because I don’t feel like I got to know her as much as others.

Eyas is our next MC and she has quite an interesting job. I won’t go into details though. She is very passionate about what she does but it makes it difficult for her to make real connections. I love her friendship/thing with Sunny. It was very natural and he is just so nice. Eyas just wants to help wherever she can and do what she thinks is right.

Sawyer is an outsider that moves to the Exodus Fleet. He just wanted change and is just trying to figure out how to live in the Fleet. It’s fun watching him trying to navigate this new life & he just wants to fit into life with the Fleet.

Lastly, we have Kip. Who is a teenager, still going to school, trying to figure out what to do with life. He is quite a sensible and kind kid and tries to do right. He sometimes gets led astray by his friend, but he sorts it out in the end. He is a nice guy and just wants to find his place in the world. Well not world, in the universe.

Overall:
Even if I didn’t love this one as much as Book 1 & 2 I still loved it. It has an amazing diverse change of characters. EXCELLENT world building & unique ‘alien’ species. What more could you want from a heavy Sci-Fi. Usually, I complain when there is little plot but it just works so well with this series. Highly recommend the whole series!
I seriously hope this series gets more books in this world! It’s just so interesting! I would love to read from the POV of one of the alien species. That would be super interesting too.
Also just a note, you could read this one as a Standalone as it’s a completely new set of characters in a different area of the universe. It could be a little confusing as they do mention other species that don’t get explained in this one as we have already learnt all about them in the other books. But it could be done. But I do recommend the others.

While I can’t say I LOVED this book. This book did drag me in and I did start caring about the characters a lot. Also when certain things happened it did make me emotional because I did care about this characters. The book was super interesting and you can’t help getting wrapped up in this world.

TRIGGER WARNINGS!
Basically any trigger warning you can think of is in this book. Here is the ones I found, but I may have missed some. This may also contain spoilers.

Domestic Abuse, Drink Driving, Deathly Car Accident , Sexism, Homophobia, Racism, Suicide, Respiratory Failure/Emphysema, Drugs, Underage sex with someone over age, Cheating, Adultery, Affairs, Blackmail, Abortion, Rape, Miscarriage, Cancer, Death of a spouse, Death of Parent, Death of a Child, Abuse & Alcohol Abuse

This review can also be found at Dusk Angel Reads

Thank you to Hachette Australia for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Writing:
First I want to talk about the feminist situation. While I do agree that there are feminist ideals in this book, I don’t think that it was any more feminist than other books I have read that aren’t specifically labelled as feminist. I think because we are told from the start that this book is feminist I just noticed it more because I was looking for it. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing but I just wanted to bring it up as this book is labelled as feminist every time I hear it talked about.

Now as for the actual writing, it was fine. I don’t have anything necessarily bad or good to say about it. The pacing was fine and it was a very quick and easy read but the writing also didn’t wow me in any way.

The world, however, is very well developed and vivid.

Plot:
Like I said in the writing section, the book was a quick mostly fast paced read. There were the odd slower bits but they weren’t enough to annoy me. There were plenty of twists and turns and for the most part, I didn’t see them coming. There was the odd time I had the feeling that something was off but couldn’t actually guess what it was until after it was revealed.

Characters:
I’ll only talk about the 2 MCs as I feel like talking about the others too much would mean being extremely vague or giving away spoilers even if it is just about the type of people they are.

Serina was my lesser favourite of the 2 sisters at the start but I did grow to enjoy her and liked her more in the end. While I didn’t necessarily agree with her all the time I mostly liked her as a character.

Nomi I enjoyed more in the start but liked less in the end because of her choices and the way she went about things. I guess she was just thinking of the bigger picture but then also risking a certain person she cares about alot?… That really didn’t make sense to me.

The romances were my least favourite part of the book. I won’t say names but I felt like one was slightly more realistic than the other. One felt like instalove, there was even one hint of marriage whereas the other had a little more building and wasn’t really love, more caring for each other and I don’t remember any proclamations of love from this couple. One of them was also slightly a love triangle as one of the girls has conflicting thoughts about who she should be attracted to. So my thoughts when said love triangle started developing were ‘please god no, I did not sign up for this crap!’.

Overall:
So while this wasn’t an absolute favourite, I did enjoy myself reading it and it was pretty easy and quick. There were things I liked and things I didn’t but hopefully book 2 will remedy some of those dislikes because I do find the world very interesting and developed and I do really want to see what happens next!

Trigger Warnings: Attempted sexual assault/rape.