Discover Top Posts Tagged with #5-stars

The Long Way to Happiness: A Review of Becky Chambers’ ‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet’

The Long Way was published nearly four years ago, now. It’s won awards, been praised inexorably by almost everyone who’s read it, and has made a stir both online, and in the world of the critics. It’s not new, per se.

But it does, in many ways, represent something new for me. Something new, and something wonderfully old, and to help you understand that, I must tell you a story.

Don’t worry, I’ll be brief. (Sort of.)

When I was six years old, I hated reading. It was difficult and boring, and although I loved to listen to stories, the books I read rarely contained such sharp wit, or simple joy. In the books I was told to read, a ball went missing and caused chaos. A magic key took people to places that meant nothing, felt like nothing. I didn’t care. It was all so stilted; nothing flowed, not the plot, or the characters, and don’t get me started on dialogue.

At the end of the year, we were given a reading assignment: to take a book from one of the higher reading tiers and read as much as we could in a month. Oh, how I complained. My book – left to me by default, since it was a boy’s book and none of the boys wanted it – was a book of short sci-fi stories. There were six in total, and I thought it would take forever. I was right, in a way. That first story was tortuous. It took me a full three weeks to read it, and I grizzled all the way through.

Then I started the second story.

I can’t tell you, now, what that story was about. I can’t tell you it’s title or it’s author. What I can tell you, is that I fell in love. I finished the rest of the book with time to spare, begged the teacher for another, and that was that.

Time went by, school got harder, and by the time GCSEs rolled around, I had already cut back my book a week to a book every two. Through A-Level I hardly had a chance to read much outside the books I was studying, and then I was at university. Studying Literature.

Dream come true, right?

Except I, and a lot of my friends, had hit something of a problem. For the last four years, we’d been told that every year was the most important year of our lives, and we couldn’t afford any mistakes. We’d pushed ourselves so hard that it was difficult to find any motivation left at all and I, like many others, stopped reading almost all together.

Three years on, and I can count the number of books I’ve read in that time on my fingers. Pretty bad, for a Lit. student, huh? The thing was, I didn’t really care anymore. Oh, I still loved the worlds inside those books, still loved the characters and the beauty of words, but it was just so much effort to pick one up and read it. There were other reasons, too, but they aren’t important here.

What is important, is that a few months ago a friend recommended The Long Way to me. Very highly. I’d just spent something like three months reading a three hundred-page novel, and I was looking to keep up the momentum. (Yep. That was momentum.) So I thought I’d give it a try.

The Long Way is four-hundred and four pages long. I finished it in five hours.

Becky Chambers’ debut novel tells the story of a tunnelling crew about the Wayfarer, who punch through reality to create the more easily traversable wormholes that other ships use to get about. Rosemary, the ship’s newest crewmember, is arguably the protagonist, but every member of the crew gets their moments in the spotlight, from the affable six-legged Dr Chef, to Kizzy, the energetic and emotional engineer.

A multi-species crew isn’t exactly a new idea – Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape – they all got there first. But the cultures Chambers has created are as wonderfully varied and original as they get, each with their own complex histories: the reptilian Aandrisk, with their complex social structures (and distinct lack of breasted females); the military, but elegant, Aeluons. Even the human cultures, Martians, Gaians, modders and travellers, have their own place and their own histories, all beautifully woven together.

Chambers uses her space-opera to explore gender and sexuality – giving readers a variety of both, as well as a variety of species – and also the importance of choices, and the unwitting impact that can have on others.

It’s Firefly meets Farscape, with a dash of early-era Star Trek, sans the censorship. It’s a feel-good novel, a book that builds characters up without unceremoniously yanking the rug out from under them, and seeks its character development through learning about other cultures and ways of life.

It should be noted, at this point, that if you’re looking for a sci-fi action thriller where some dread world-ending event happens every other chapter, you may wish to look elsewhere. The Long Way is slow-paced, but not less exceptional for it. Character is the heart of the story, and although the book is hardly without any action (there are plenty of perilous moments), it is relationships, not disaster, that drives the main plot. Not just romantic relationships, either, though there’s lots of love to go around; friendship is as important a bond in this book as any love affair.

It’s also, and I cannot stress this enough, wonderfully queer. Genderfluid character? Check. Bisexual characters? Check. Lesbian relationship? Check. And none of them are used as jokes.

TL;DR, should you The Long Way by Becky Chambers? YES. Unequivocally. I would (and have) recommend it to anyone looking for something a little different in their science-fiction, something a little new, built on a wonderfully solid tradition of space-opera, of the shipboard family and their sallies through space.

For me, best of all, the highest praise I can give it: it made me fall in love with reading again, in a way I haven’t since that first sci-fi story when I was six.

Thanks, Becky Chambers.

Can’t wait to pick up the next one.

♦♦♦♦♦

#the long way to a small angry planet #becky chambers #book review #sci-fi #5-stars

7 Ways to Improve Your Uber Passenger Rating

Get your 5-star rating today!

#LOL #Funny OR Die #Uber #5-stars #funny #humor #comedy #haha