What’s really set up well is the formatting and Rosemary’s inner thoughts to set up this future. We see alot of it through Rosemary’s eyes and it serves as a good entry point since she isn’t a ‘spacer’ herself, having lived on Mars her whole life. You really get sucked into the lives of these characters and heavily invested even from the first few pages. It was the best decision I could have made. This is my second time reading this and it was the first book I finished this year. The ship is a tunnelling vessel, punching holes through space for ease of travel and the book follows the whole crew as they take up a government contract to punch a hole through to a hostile spot of space. This book follows the crew of the ship ‘Wayfarer’, starting with the perspective of Rosemary Harper as she joins the crew as their clerk. There will be mild spoilers for the end of the first book, since the second is happening as a result of a big event in it so consider this a spoiler warning. Since I would be here forever writing individual reviews of books with that much characters and substance (also how my brain has put them all into one large story as a result of marathoning them), I’m going to do this in one post. Childbearing and motherhood another, how other species handle gender, sexuality and personal freedom not far off either. Subjects like war and the price of peace for one, the well natured attempt at understanding others cultures but sometimes causing more hurt than intended. Love, hope, dispair, family and friendship are among the main focus but some things are questioned on a more deeper level. These stories focus more on the lives of the people living in this future of a Galactic Commons, where humans are a rarity and other sapient species live along side them, as they manage everyday life. Each novel follows different people, though all tie back to, or appear in passing, in the first book. The Wayfarers series is a series of 4 companion novels, a story as hopeful and tender as the characters she has created.

See Becky Chambers has captured a lot of people’s hearts with this series, my own included. I saw it recommended by a few of the small amount of booktube I watched at the time and my experience with science fiction to that point was solely Ray Bradbury and similar. I am currently reading the final book in the series, The Galaxy and the Ground Within, and that will be getting it’s own review since I was approved for it on Net Galley.īit of background to this post, one of the first scifi books I read getting back into SFF back in 2016/2017 was The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. I have kicked off the year by rereading and finishing (hopefully) the four books in Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series.

Record of a spaceborn few summary