The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4 due to GR metric.

Things I liked:
- Feels like the love child of Firefly and Mass Effect, and fulfilled my desire to drop into random lives of aliens in the Star Wars universe and get a glimpse into their cultures and lives. I think Chambers does a fantastic job here with world building and making some alien species and cultures that feel well thought out and differences between set up interpersonal conflicts well.
- I think although the characters play archetypes they are written well, and there were some moments that really made me feel warm and fuzzy inside about some. Although Chambers' works are well-known for being more hopeful, as are most of her characters, I didn't find them cloying or saccharine as much as I thought I would (although at times it cleaves quite close to it).
- The “science” part of the science fiction here has some cool ideas, though I'm not a hard SF fan so much, I'm on board for hand-waving complicated systems if it fits the larger narrative to not spend a ton of time exploring it, but Chambers doesn't spend pages and pages expounding on systems, nor does she hand-wave it away. I think a nice balance is struck here, and I didn't find myself distracted by how technology or science is used in the book- and could tell she has a passion for it!
- As an fan of grimdark fan of fantasy/SF/horror what initially drew me to this series was the concept of a more hopeful look at a future, which I think Chambers really delivers on. What she keys into well I think is the idea that on a base level, most people want to be liked by others, and want to like them. It's kind of a basic human desire, and for some reason so much of literature and genre fiction totally misses this and we get a bevy of brooding, angsty, dickheads (which a lot of do exist in real life, don't get me wrong), so it's nice to see a universe where for the most part the people inhabiting it generally want to get along.

Things I wasn't so hot on:
- Personally I found Kizzy a tad grating at times. She seems to oscillate between hyperactive teenager (bordering on Tiny Tina from the Borderlands games) to more grounded and somewhat self-serious when things got serious or emotional. Mostly the hyperactive giddiness is the stuff that grates me, but I think that's just personal taste.
- I'm 100% behind more hopeful SF, and decolonizing our concepts of the future and not assuming the worst, but the first 1/2-2/3rds of the book felt kind of... frictionless? Not much happens aside from world building, relationship building, conversations, and the crew getting to know each other which was interesting and I'm here for it, but once the plot started to move I felt the overbearing sense that all the characters would be protected by plot armor due to it's more hopeful bent (I was at least partially wrong). I wasn't looking for George R. R. Martin by any means, but some characters make some pretty heavy decisions especially later in the book and it's not really explored to any degree and I would have liked to see how that dramatic tension played out with more detail.
- It felt a tad over-long. I get that there's a lot of ground for Chambers to cover in setting the world up here, and maybe the subsequent books are slimmer as a result, but I found myself dragging through some sections because the pace lagged.