The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

This was such a lovely little book (it's actually quite thick – but it reads fast.) Chambers writes a lovely interstellar setting, with seemingly endless diversity of alien cultures, anatomy and biology. I really felt that the world building was stellar and that I could delve into each of the alien races. I also really liked that humans were kind of a lesser-race in the galaxy – nice twist.

As billed, the best part of the book is the chosen-family relationship that develops among the crew of the Wayfarers, despite interpersonal tension, major cultural differences and occasional fights. Their care for each other and the way that they all learned to understand each other was really evident. There's something really satisfying about reading about characters who are deeply-developed and obviously well-loved by their author, and I'm constantly complaining about the dearth of literature on platonic non-familial relationships.

And while I'm annoyed that most of the races in the galaxy were bipedal and used DNA (why DNA? Fine, if it's going to be nucleic acids, RNA, novel sugars, novel bases? There have got to be more self-replicating molecules in the galaxy. Geneticists of the future, I'm jealous.) but at least Chambers lamp-shaded how unlikely this is, and I felt like it was genre-aware.

Don't be swayed into thinking that this book is perfect: it read pretty disjointed. Each chapter seemed more like a TV episode in a semi-serial show than a book chapter – often characters or plots were limited to a single chapter to be explored, concluded and discarded. The character and setting development definitely outshone the plot.

Overall, a really nice debut novel – perfect warm & fuzzy reading, especially for Firefly fans.