The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Meh, I had a hard time staying interested in this, mostly because the writing is extremely amateurish. The pacing is all over the place, the plot doesn't really do much, and the tone is very uninspired (the whole thing reads like “this happened, then this other thing happened” without very much richness of description or really much texture at all).

The characters are interesting-ish, but the author writes about them as if she's writing about the wacky hijinks of some dear friends of hers from college, and I just never really warmed up to them. Rosemary, very obviously the reader stand-in, is cardboard-thin as a character; the narrative technique of “she asks to have something explained to her” is overused and ultimately makes her seem kind of dull-witted. Plus she's often weirdly judgmental of alien habits even though she's supposedly an anthropologist so... okay. Her character is not at all well-defined.

The plot is a mess – the author keeps introducing plot points that seem like they're going to be pivotal, only to either resolve them super quickly and without very much suspense, or have them just sort of peter out.

I really wanted to like this book – I mean, it's awesome that it normalizes a bunch of stuff like preferred pronouns, homosexuality, and alternative relationship styles. It's awesome that it features such a diverse cast of characters. It gestures in the direction of some pretty interesting philosophical questions (albeit without really following through on any of them). Ultimately I think it just isn't a very well-executed novel.

It will probably make the anti-SJW crowd angry (which in and of itself is a selling point), but it tends to pull back from concepts that would be truly challenging. For example, the character that uses “they” pronouns isn't agender or anything like that, they're two entities. Rosemary and Sissix's relationship: the conversation is just Sissix proposing a bunch of boundaries and Rosemary agreeing to everything, and then apparently it's all hunky-dory and there's never any conflict. Lovey's death: it's as if the author wasn't sure how to resolve the plot threads about personhood and wanted an easy way out.

If you haven't read Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, I definitely recommend picking that up first. It scratches pretty much the same itch but is also far better-written!