A Closed and Common Orbit

Following on from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where the Wayfarer has been almost destroyed in an alien attack. The AI that runs the ship has been blitzed and when it was rebooted it reverted to a brand new install, having lost all it's memories and relationships with the crew.

In this book the AI has been transferred to a body kit and the story from here explores the difficulty of the transfer from ship to body. Running parallel is the story of Jane, a ten year old girl who was artificially bred to be a factory worker. Chapters alternate between the cloned human working out her life and the AI in an artificial body working out her life. Their respective struggles are intermingled with the strange relationships between various aliens that populate the planet.

It's the cozy scifi of Becky Chambers with the same sense of optimism of the Angry Planet story. This time she deals with themes of identity and acceptance in a deeper way. It got a bit bogged down in the expository stuff in the middle but suddenly sparked up again once we got back to characters instead of concepts.