About half way through this book, I was filled with a deep sadness about what was going to happen next. I extrapolated from Jane and Owl’s loving relationship to Owl’s absence in the present day of Pepper’s (Jane’s) narrative, that Owl was going to die in some fashion. That the sweet, caring computer program that helped Jane survive in that continent-sized garbage dump was going to be torn away from her charge and lost forever. Thankfully, this is not what happened. But my god, when I thought it was going to happen, was I sad about it.

Becky Chambers does it again with her achingly relatable prose. Childhood Jane sounds and thinks like a child, though an understandably strange one. The way she takes the strangeness of her past as a given and builds up a semblance of normality from it makes a lot of sense. Her efforts to learn Klip, her time spent enjoying the sim programs and wanting so much to have someone else to be there with her, were all very endearing and had me turning page after page to find out what happened.

In the other timeline, Sidra’s discovery about how she could live a life, and if she wanted to live a life like that, was very well realized. The way the reader could understand her problems but also that Pepper understandably didn’t, stood out as a great way to get the reader to root for her.

When I saw that this sequel to “The long way to a small, angry planet” didn’t follow the crew of the Wayfarer and instead followed the Lovelace that had been removed from the ship about 75% of the way through the previous book, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m glad this story was told, and that we didn’t just follow after Rosemary and the others, as was the obvious next step for such a series.

This is a great book. You should read it. But you should read the one before it first.

A Closed and Common Orbit

By Becky Chambers

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19

Reference links: Why I like Storygraph, My concerns with Goodreads, How my scoring system works