Nophek Gloss

I read this book slowly because I wanted to make it last. It is another incredible work of storytelling. Caiden is an excellent character, even though there were definitely moments I wanted to shake him. I absolutely loved his found family, and mourned his losses with him. Seriously, the speed at which the author made me love some of these characters was astounding.

Essa does a brilliant job of drawing the reader into Caiden’s world and then rapidly expanding it as his understanding expands, so the reader gets to feel Caiden’s awe and disorientation (without it being overwhelming). The aliens are really alien and so cool, and yet at the core they’re just people, as it should be. Shades of grey are everywhere throughout this book, and Caiden wrestles with morality as much as he wrestles with his (justified) anger. Every secondary character felt fully realized and fleshed out, and they stepped right off the page with their own traumas and their own goals, and I loved them. Well, except one. He can still rot, even if he feels like a whole person. Even many of the tertiary, background characters felt fully realized, despite seeing them for a short time, and I love the way they add a layer of history to the crew.

The universe felt vast and the factions felt real, with good people crossing paths with Caiden along with really-not-nice-at-all people. But even the antagonists are fleshed out and multi-dimensional, with factions within factions (sometimes within factions!), and I loved the peeks into the wider politics of the universe. And what a universe it is—vast and multi-layered, with universe bubbles touching universe bubbles, each with varying physics and other conditions, and that was just so cool. The tech was super cool, too, and the gloss leads to some Spice-like economic-political shenanigans.

In addition to all this, Essa manages to wrestle big questions with thoughtfulness and I really appreciated that. Caiden’s quest for revenge and how much he risks for it, the questions of how responsible he is for things that happen that he can’t prevent, and the way he slowly learns to look beyond monsters to see if the heart of the monster is really a monster or not. Just masterfully done, I thought. A ton of action is packed into this book, yet it begins and ends rather slowly and thoughtfully, counter-pointing the gripping, hectic pace of some of the chapters in the middle.

So in short, if you enjoy sci-fi with alien aliens, multi-layered societies, three dimensional characters, emotional intensity, and questions of morality, you need to read this book.

And then we can all want our own pet nopheks together.

For those interested, the main character is ace-spectrum, and there's fantastic trans, nonbinary, and #OwnVoices neurodivergent representation in this book too. (En is the best supporting friend ever.)

NOPHEK GLOSS is about a boy growing up too fast and being shouldered with trauma and responsibility greater than can reasonably be comprehended, finding a new family along the way but not quite being able to trust that connections forged so rapidly can in fact be genuine and enduring… in space. 

I'm about to discuss how much I didn't like the main character so I'd like to stress that the book is so good that it held me despite not liking the main character until close to the end. The world is great, it deals with trauma in a way that is understandable even if it's not always the best decision (since an instinctual reaction to trauma is rarely the best one in the long run, but it is often relatable in the short term). 

The third person narration just follows Caiden (except in the epilogue), so every scene is necessarily filled with his voice. I don't like Caiden as a person for the most of the book. He's stubborn, hasty, and doesn't think things through. He thinks far enough to figure out whether the one outcome he desires might maybe happen and then he rushes towards it, only pausing later to figure out whether he might have tried something else. Even once he's talked through what to do with someone, he'll get stressed, scared, or just talk to another person and then change his mind, taking drastic action without talking to anyone about the change. All of this completely makes sense with his background and current circumstances in that way that means if he acted less hastily or more reasonably he would make less sense overall and be poorly-suited for his world. He's a teenager who makes a series of decisions early in the book that make his body and mind more capable without catching up his emotional processing to match. It's a neat narrative trick, as it allows for literally childish decisions to be made in his quest for revenge, driven by guilt and sorrow. 

At the end of NOPHEK GLOSS everything I just described and complained about with Caiden changes. He matures in a harrowing and tortuous few weeks which force him to reckon with his past in an awfully visceral way and then to use his relatively new adult cunning to actually try and think more than one move ahead in order to save everyone he loves who can still be saved. It’s an exhilarating sequence which forms the climax of the narrative and a large part of its catharsis. I like this version of Caiden a bit better as a person, but more importantly it’s a better version of him that fits with the emotional arc of the book and shows a kind of maturity, one that’s consistent with his past self. He’s still daring and reckless, but he shows the ability to channel that disregard for his own safety by waiting to be reckless until he can do the most good with his death-defying antics. 
character relationships - Caiden bonds into a found family with the crew very quickly, I would say too quickly except that there’s a narrative reason that it might have been sped up while still being a genuine connection. I like his rapport with En the best, they’re supportive of him while pushing him when they think he needs it, and they’re usually right. The crew are various kinds of sapient beings, and unless I missed something I think no more than two of them are human (possibly none of them are). They have interpersonal tangles which predate Caiden’s arrival, pulling him into a tangled but mostly friendly space even though he doesn’t initially get along with everyone. I appreciate how long it takes for him to get close to some of the crew, it helps them feel like their own beings and not just convenient plot devices.

This is definitely soft sci-fi, there are only a few specific concepts and technologies to keep track of with very few technical explanations. There’s a distinct sensibility as to how characters navigate the world, but the actual worldbuilding is shown instead of told. What is explained is how those technologies matter to the beings who use them, and what the stakes are if they are used in destructive ways. Caiden is an engineer, but there are almost no descriptions of what it’s like to fix the ship or do any engineering things. It fits well with the setup of travelling through multiverses, since Passagers really wouldn’t be intimately familiar with histories behind the breadth of technologies and tools potentially available to them. 

Almost half of the book is spent trying to navigate healing from major trauma in the first couple of chapters, and then the last quarter is spent using everything that happened to take on a lot more trauma with the goal of stopping even more. Caiden is traumatized, rescued, accelerated, then he escapes to try and fix it all but runs into the power of his enemy and the limitations of his uneasy ally before he gains the opportunity and necessity of enacting a dramatic rescue and last stand against a nearly invincible enemy. Emotionally and interpersonally, the focus is on how what Caiden most needed to heal was time and support, and he was so desperate to shortcut the first that he ended up running away from the second.