Rating: 5 stars
Monthly Keyword Challenge 26: Ground
Nowhere Book Bingo 26: A book that came out more than 4 years ago
Defeating the Goblin TBR 26: The Gizmo Book (A Sci-fi or Dystopian book)
Reading Rainbow - Indigo cover
The planet of Gora doesn't have much to recommend itself to anyone, except as a stopover for travellers to other, more interesting parts of space. Travellers can rest, refuel, eat, restock their supplies and update any permits that might be required. It's like an interstellar truck stop between big wormholes.
The Five-Hop One-Stop is run by Ouloo, a Laru (from the description of what the Laru looked like, I imagined a Golden Retriever with longer limbs and a long, bendable neck), and her child, Tupo. Ouloo clearly takes immense pride in catering to her guests, and has made an effort to make the Five-Hop One-Stop as comfortable for as many species who travel the galaxy as possible. She's courteous, but also curious about the various lives of the visitors who come and go.
While Ouloo is hosting three very different guests, all there mainly to refuel and restock for a brief while, there is some sort of catastrophic event that leads a lot of the satellites around the planet to crash down, meaning all travel in and out of the planet is halted, and all communications are shut down. So for five days, Ouloo, Tupo and the three guests are stranded together at the Five-Hop One-Stop. There is Speaker, an Akarak, separated from her sickly twin sister for the first time ever. The Akarak can't breathe oxygen, so they wear space suits whenever they leave their ship. Based on the description of her species, I pictured the Akarak basically like big sloths. The second traveller, who is very distressed by not being able to travel further, is Roveg, a Quelin (seemed a bit like an armoured centipede), who has a very important appointment he needs to get to, and the delays on Gora could mean he misses his chance. The final guest is Pei, an Aeluon (they communicate in colours), who readers who have read the first book in the Wayfarers series will recognise as Captain Ashby's romantic partner.
This book has very little plot to speak of, although there are some dramatic things that happen over the course of the five days. What the reader gets is five character studies, but that's not nothing, because Becky Chambers writes so beautifully that even five people stuck in the same place and trying their best to get along (and in the case of Speaker and Roveg, not panic about the delays) is fascinating to read, and I wouldn't have minded another hundred pages or so, especially since this is the final book in the series. While this is the fourth and final book, all the books can be read independently of each other, and work perfectly well as stand-alones.
It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what made me love this book so much. The only character who has appeared in any of Chambers' books before is Pei, and there she was a secondary character, whose point of view we were never able to share her point of view, like we do here. Yet Chambers makes you care for all of them, and become invested in their lives and futures. As is pretty much always the case, this book made me smile, and it made me cry, and I didn't really want it to end.
Chambers doesn't appear to have published anything since the Monk & Robot novellas, which came out in 2021 and 2022. I do hope she hasn't stopped writing entirely, but whatever she is doing, I hope she is enjoying it.
Judging a book by its cover: The UK covers for these books, with the vast views of starlit skies, are all so beautiful, and the US covers for these are so very clunky and (to me) ugly. The font, the way the images are positioned, I do not care for them. Which is why I've made sure I buy the UK editions when I have the chance.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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