It’s Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaceeeeeeeeee. Seven pilgrims, a one-way destination, and each person’s story told along the way. It’s a fine setup and I loved the execution, but the larger story (why we’re reading the book in the first place) seems to take a back seat amongst everyone’s personal stories.

I say this with every short story compilation I read (because that’s the meat of this book), but it really is a mixed bag here with certain characters’ stories being way more compelling than others. The Poet’s tale was my least favorite (owing mostly to my dislike of his character in general), followed closely by the Consul’s tale, weirdly enough. I initially liked the Consul as a character, but his story basically brought nothing to the table that we didn’t already know, unlike the other stories. It was also the shortest and least memorable in my opinion. But all that said, each story is told in a different way, almost entirely different genres from each other, and I think the author deserves credit for pulling that off successfully. It’s not often I go from a sci-fi pilgrimage to a touching family drama dealing with terminal illness to a cyberpunk murder mystery all in the same book.

This was cruising along for a 5 star rating, until we get to the Epilogue. Ending spoilers here: The boogeyman of the book, the Shrike, deserved way more pages than it got. I was super into whatever the Shrike was and was looking forward to its mystery being unraveled slowly with each story told, but I didn’t get that. I was also looking forward to some sort of confrontation with it at the end of the book, but I didn’t get that either. I get that this is a series and a lot of this is probably addressed in book 2, but I’m in the camp that says a book should be able to stand on its own merits without being propped up by a sequel, and I didn’t get that feeling here.

All that said I thought this was a really well done book. Lots of food for thought here, and I loved the prose. The different feels of each pilgrim’s story also contributed to a general feeling of different backgrounds coming together for a (reluctant) goal. I’ll definitely be picking up book 2 at some point!