Review: A Closed and Common Orbit

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are two stories in this book: the story of Jane, who escapes from slavery and has to navigate her way off the junk planet where she finds herself stranded. And the story of Sidra, an AI illegally loaded into a fake human body. I thought the first of these was gorgeous, while the second was only mildly successful, and the attempt to braid them together at the end mostly failed for me. If the big, climactic challenge at the end of your book is going to be "how do we rescue an AI trapped in the ship that houses it", then it's probably not a good idea to _start_ the book with a different character who has already overcome that exact problem, off-camera.

The characters are still excellently-drawn, and the world building is very well done. Chambers does a particularly good job of depicting aliens in a way that is sufficiently comprehensible to be empathic, but still foreign enough to feel like aliens. Well worth the read.

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