Read at the recommendation of my friend. I enjoyed this. It wasn’t as scary as I had maybe hoped but it was unsettling and with art that I fell into.

I really enjoy Becky Chambers. This novella is different from her original trilogy but it holds much of the same hope and love that those novels do. It's great for fans of so-called "hard scifi" but also great for folks like me who don't generally prefer that genre. Literally there is so much to love about this book and you can easily read it in a day.

I'm pretty torn by how to rate this. I loved Last Days of Night and this was a very different story. I think what bothers me, mostly, is how much better this story could have been. There are so many interesting themes here, so many moments when the book could really have said something. Instead, it pokes its toe into too many waters and so it merely damp when it could have been drenched. I still enjoyed it and it was interesting enough to keep me moving from chapter to chapter. But overall it's still a firm 3 on what could have been a five star story.

This was overall just extremely boring. I was excited to read a thriller that wasn't focused on a woman being murdered but the this novel just did not do it for me. I did not find even a single character realistic or compelling. The plot line seemed pretty obvious to me so nothing was really a surprise. The only good thing about it was the very positive and realistic portrayal of a healthy Poly relationship. I do wish more novels had that but I also won't give this a higher rating than it deserves just for that.

So the biggest problem I have with this book is that July is a terrible friend who absolutely does not take responsibility for anything she does. There are multiple times when the author seems to try and forgive her actions but said actions are still just really awful and selfish. She spends almost no time thinking about how Doni thinks or feels. She is kind of a bully, too. I also didn't really feel like the plot was compelling because it revolved so heavily around July. It doesn't help that Doni doesn't seem to have any sort of personality.

Oh gosh. I love this book so much. I love me some good politics heavy fantasy and this one does that without managing to fall into the pitfalls of so many stories. It doesn't rely on heavy explaining and trusts the reader to infer obvious things while also world building enough that it is easy to see what the author is doing. I'm obsessed with this series and I need everyone to please read it at once!

I greatly enjoyed the narrative of this novel. I found the characters deeply complex and interesting. I like how flawed and human these women felt. It is very much Korean but it also feels extremely universal. I love how open the ending was, how much it felt like these women still had lives to live. I found it incredibly personal.

Ya know I really wanted to like this book. I didn't hate Alice right away but by the end of the novel I couldn't stand her. I don't feel like we got enough of Nellie to really get to know or like her. What little plot the novel has revolves around miscommunication or willful lying. I can't tell if the reader is supposed to side with Alice in the end, if we are meant to understand her or like her. She goes from hating the house and not telling her husband to loving the house more than any person. There is also plot points that get dropped or things that are either not explained or explained poorly.

This is a great primer for young readers on the history of the Antiracist movement and black history in general. I think it goes just deep enough for the target audience and lends itself well for people who are interested but don't want to get one big brick of a book. I highly recommend it, particularly for teens or people who work with teens.