The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Okay, wow.
This book was a ride. A ride on the railway to emotions town!
(I don't why I picked this metaphor but ist 1 a.m. so I'm excused.)
So lemme tell you, I had high hopes going into it.
1. Good cover
2.character focused sci-fi
and
3. A good friend of mine really - like: REALLY - likes it.

An I gotta say, it didn't gripped me from the start. I was fairly intrigued by all the characters and their interactions with one another, as well as curious about the interplanetary locations we were going to discover.
And a major selling point were the characters for me. Hence I was a bit taken aback by the lack of individuality in their dialogue. Don't get me wrong, it was a lot of funny banter. Which is always nice to read. But I had my issues with bisecting the lines from one another. If you removed the name - pretty much everybody could have said the sentence. At least it felt like it.
But it definitely improved later on. Probably because I learned A LOT more about the personalities the crew mates are made of.
And oh boi do I love them now.
I do think that there is a lot more character development to be had and a lot more conflicts that could come up. Something that I am not content with.
Because I won't get it. It's pretty much a standalone and I dislike this fact and won't accept it. >:-(

And even though I love me some good conflicts between characters, that's not really the point of this story. (tho I got my fair share of it)
Sure there a high stakes, a plot and all that –
but I believe this story is about something deeper than that.
It's about Forgiveness. Acceptance. Love. Kindness. And Tolerance. Just life itself.

I don't really care that I didn't like the pacing of the first half or that I wish it had a different prose.
It doesn't matter to me as much. Because I saw what Becky tried to achieve with this novel. Values and themes she conveyed in such beautiful analogies.
Idk.
I just don't want to put my finger on the points that I wish were different.
She clearly focused everything about the things that matter most.

So why should I do it differently?