Jessica
This was fine. I’ve really appreciated this series’ world-building, but as time has gone on, I’ve less and less enjoyed the directionless, tension-free narratives (although admittedly they are punctuated by bad things that come out of nowhere before they’re swiftly resolved again). I gather that the boring “slice of life” stuff is a large part of why this series is so popular, and I’m not here to tell anyone not to enjoy what they enjoy, but… it doesn’t do it for me.
Anyway, this instalment in the series is set at what is basically an interstellar truck stop, where a few travellers from diverse alien backgrounds are forced to stay a few days after some satellite-related disaster that cuts comms and grounds all transport. There are some misunderstandings resulting from their different backgrounds, and given the low-stakes nature of everything up to that point there was the genuinely shocking almost-death of the adolescent Laru when he was JUST TRYING TO DELIVER SOME CAKE, but (almost) everything gets worked out in the end and everyone is happy. If I’m honest there was one character in particular that I found frustratingly unrelatable (well, her just wanting to spend her few weeks of leave fucking her boyfriend was quite relatable. everything else about her was not) and it still kind of rankles with me that Unrelatable Character was too racist or something to recognise how bad it is that Speaker’s entire species has no inhabitable planet of their own, being totally dependent on spaceships and spacesuits for survival, while her own species keeps colonising new planets like there’s no tomorrow. There was definitely some moral in there about sometimes people have political disagreements with us but we should be friends anyway which seemed a bit meh. I also wasn’t keen on Ouloo’s “I don’t want to care about politics, I just think everyone should be nice” which was framed like some radical truth when actually it’s naive as hell, lol.
Look, probably I could keep going on nitpicking minor things that annoyed me, but the truth is that the book is okay. I managed to read the last two-thirds in one day, mainly because I really wanted to make sure to finish it this year so I didn’t have to adjust my 2025 reading goal again, but I couldn’t have done that if it weren’t at least easy reading. And I genuinely do find the world-building interesting, and once the single most shocking event of the book happened I wanted to keep reading to make sure the affected character would be OK, so obviously I got invested to some extent. Like I said, the book was fine… I just don’t think, having finished this series, I’m going to read much else from this “hopepunk” genre because it’s clearly not for me.
Originally posted at www.jayeless.net.
This was fine. I’ve really appreciated this series’ world-building, but as time has gone on, I’ve less and less enjoyed the directionless, tension-free narratives (although admittedly they are punctuated by bad things that come out of nowhere before they’re swiftly resolved again). I gather that the boring “slice of life” stuff is a large part of why this series is so popular, and I’m not here to tell anyone not to enjoy what they enjoy, but… it doesn’t do it for me.
Anyway, this instalment in the series is set at what is basically an interstellar truck stop, where a few travellers from diverse alien backgrounds are forced to stay a few days after some satellite-related disaster that cuts comms and grounds all transport. There are some misunderstandings resulting from their different backgrounds, and given the low-stakes nature of everything up to that point there was the genuinely shocking almost-death of the adolescent Laru when he was JUST TRYING TO DELIVER SOME CAKE, but (almost) everything gets worked out in the end and everyone is happy. If I’m honest there was one character in particular that I found frustratingly unrelatable (well, her just wanting to spend her few weeks of leave fucking her boyfriend was quite relatable. everything else about her was not) and it still kind of rankles with me that Unrelatable Character was too racist or something to recognise how bad it is that Speaker’s entire species has no inhabitable planet of their own, being totally dependent on spaceships and spacesuits for survival, while her own species keeps colonising new planets like there’s no tomorrow. There was definitely some moral in there about sometimes people have political disagreements with us but we should be friends anyway which seemed a bit meh. I also wasn’t keen on Ouloo’s “I don’t want to care about politics, I just think everyone should be nice” which was framed like some radical truth when actually it’s naive as hell, lol.
Look, probably I could keep going on nitpicking minor things that annoyed me, but the truth is that the book is okay. I managed to read the last two-thirds in one day, mainly because I really wanted to make sure to finish it this year so I didn’t have to adjust my 2025 reading goal again, but I couldn’t have done that if it weren’t at least easy reading. And I genuinely do find the world-building interesting, and once the single most shocking event of the book happened I wanted to keep reading to make sure the affected character would be OK, so obviously I got invested to some extent. Like I said, the book was fine… I just don’t think, having finished this series, I’m going to read much else from this “hopepunk” genre because it’s clearly not for me.
Originally posted at www.jayeless.net.