Em reviewed The long way to a small, angry planet by Becky Chambers (Wayfarers, #1)
oddly bad from an author I typically enjoy
2 stars
I disliked the level of writing skill present in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Upsetting because I really loved A Psalm for the Wild-Built, also by Becky Chambers. I ended up finishing TLWtaSAP waiting for it to get better. It did not. My first 2/5 star completed read in a while.
Dialogue was often awkward and unnatural. Transitions between locations and events were absent. A sense of time in the book is almost completely missing - if you aren't paying attention to dates for each chapter (I often flipped back to the prior chapter to get a sense of time), you will have little to no idea how much time is actually passing. This means that within chapters, it feels like a fever dream where time loses all meaning.
I'm sure this is an enjoyable read for people who enjoy the characters who get a lot of …
I disliked the level of writing skill present in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Upsetting because I really loved A Psalm for the Wild-Built, also by Becky Chambers. I ended up finishing TLWtaSAP waiting for it to get better. It did not. My first 2/5 star completed read in a while.
Dialogue was often awkward and unnatural. Transitions between locations and events were absent. A sense of time in the book is almost completely missing - if you aren't paying attention to dates for each chapter (I often flipped back to the prior chapter to get a sense of time), you will have little to no idea how much time is actually passing. This means that within chapters, it feels like a fever dream where time loses all meaning.
I'm sure this is an enjoyable read for people who enjoy the characters who get a lot of page time. I would've enjoyed them more if their reactions to one another and the world around them were more consistent and organic. The dialogue really killed any affection I had for them. It seemed the characters were stereotypical tropes and if you recognized the trope, you'd know everything about the character and what they'd do. But this meant that on the rare occasion where they break out of the trope to monologue - essentially infodumping on the reader and not really communicating with another character - it comes off as really insincere and not true to who they are.