becky chambers

TOP TEN TUESDAY: Anticipated Reads Cover Love

- Meg 6 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly discussion hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl (and formerly hosted by The Broke and the Bookish), and this week’s topic is “Cover Freebie” so I decided to look up some books I’ve been hearing about recently and books I’ve been waiting a while for their release and collected all of the covers!

  • A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik – I have actually never read anything by Naomi Novik (yet!!), but I love magical schools and this seems to be right up my alley.
  • In the Quick by Kate Hope Day – This is compared to The Martian and is about a female astronaut’s life and a love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew, and I’m intrigued? The cover of this is interesting, too!
  • The Gilded Ones by Naima Forna – I think the date of this one got pushed back, but a young woman who prays for her blood to be a certain color and fate intervening looks like it will be something I’ll like!
  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab – This seems like it’s on everyone’s lists this fall, but I’ve enjoyed every book of hers I’ve read, and this one looks to be one of her more ambitious endeavors.
  • The Mask Falling, by Samantha Shannon – I’m a book behind in this series, but I’m looking forward to a reread of all of them soon as I got an arc of this! I love binging series, I’ve noticed, so the more I can read at once, the better.
  • Malice, by Heather Walter – This comes out like two weeks before my birthday next year and it’s a f/f retelling of Sleeping Beauty, one of my favorite fairy tales, and I just want this in my hands now.
  • The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers – Becky Chambers writes amazingly wholesome and heartfelt science fiction, and I’m very happy to see they’re continuing the Wayfarers series.
  • The Heiress Gets a Duke by Harper St. George – I love stuff set in the Gilded Age? Like give me all the things.
  • The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec – A banished witch who falls in love with Loki??? I love ancient myth retellings, and this one popped up on my radar the other day and stuck.
  • Wild Women and the Blues, by Denny S. Bryce – This ties together a film student in 2015 and a chorus girl in 1925 in Chicago, and I’m looking forward to reading a lot of jazz age books this decade.

Are any of these on your radar? What are you looking forward to reading most?

BOOK REVIEW: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers

- Meg

fbmreview

BOOK REVIEW: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky ChambersTitle: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1) by Becky Chambers
Series: Wayfarers #1
Published by Harper Voyager
Published: July 5th 2016
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 443
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

Follow a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe—in this light-hearted debut space opera from a rising sci-fi star.
Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.
Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.

 Humans’ preoccupation with ‘being happy’ was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.

When she joins the crew of the Wayfarer, Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect the motley crew of oddballs, but she comes to find that group of oddballs family and learns a lot about herself, about what makes a family, and about her place in life throughout the journey the Wayfarer takes throughout the course of the book.

I absolutely loved this book. It reminded me of Firefly and Star Trek (The Original Series), and it is such a happy science fiction book that made me giddy every time I opened it up to read more. It seems so rare that we have positive, happy, not-too-cynical science fiction that explores identity, gender, and existence. It’s fun, campy, and smart, and more likely than not, you’ll fly through this book and be left wanting more.

My only disappointments were that I felt that there were too many perspectives for so short a novel and that the characters didn’t develop that much throughout the course of the novel, and that might be because of the wide cast of characters explored throughout. However, it is the first in a loosely connected series (or duology), so I’m looking forward to seeing Chambers’ writing in her second book.

I’ve been recommending this to everyone, from die-hard sf fans to people who have rarely, if ever, dipped their toes in sf. It’s a great addition to the genre – especially because we need more happy, hopeful sf books – and it’s a great introduction to the genre.