This was fantastic. Just the barest minimum of compelling plot though, so if that's what you usually read for, you might want to skip this one, but for my money, it didn't need more than what was here.

Becky Chambers does for alien civilizations and species what the very best authors do for their characters. Each species is so well thought out and lovingly described that you can't help but imagine things from their point of view. And there are first-person characters from each of the species as well, and you empathize with what they experience in ways that feels simultaneously totally alien, and also so very, very human.

In a way, I feel like this series is a bit of a spiritual successor to the Culture novels, by Ian M. Banks, or anyway, I felt like that a bit with this one. No sentient space ships tho. But it's slice of life in that sort of a post-scarcity multi-civilization galactic culture.

I shed more than one tear in the reading of this book, and yet, none of them were in sadness! This was so, so good, and if I hadn't already read every other book published by Becky Chambers, I'd be off to buy the next one right away.