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I liked all three books in this trilogy. I found them gripping, and when I finished the first one in particular I was eager for more. The first was still, I think, the best, but the others are worth reading. Novik's approach to avoiding more-of-the-same is the classic one of escalating the scale and the stakes from book to book, starting out at the individual level and ending at hte global.

The books are about privilege, about principle vs comprimise and the costs of each, and so forth... but don't expect anything super-subtle or nuanced. The first two books in particular are mostly a driven journey through the bleak but engaging contained world of a school for magical children that has a rather modest survival rate. The third book happens on the outside, and is thus less focused, but serves to bring big-picture storylines together.

Mild spoilers folliow.

I found it a bit odd that our protagonest went from "super-powerful in one particular branch of magic that she doesn't want to use, struggles otherwise" in book one, to "just super-powerful, and super-adept, in all areas" in book three. Sure, by book three she is being fed a steady and generous mana supply much of the time, but I don't think this fully explains it; it feels like something that is a little contrived, and unexplained, for plot convenience.

That's my only real criticism, I think.

After the first two books being so different to each other (although I liked them both in different ways), I didn't really know what to expect here.

The answer is "somewhere in the middle, with a bit of both". It has some of the tenderness and gentle characterisation of the first, but with pacing a bit closer to the second, and this is the book that finally develops large-scale plot in a way that makes both of the earlier books more worthwhile.

I didn't enjoy the romance in this book as much, but I think that's simply that it didn't match my tastes so well - it was still written with great nuance and character-realism. Plus, especially compared to the first book, the romance here is not the central focus - it is important, but is one of a number of things that are going on with what is, by this point in the trilogy, quite a large ensemble cast.

An excellent book rounding out an excellent trilogy that is worth reading for more than the three excellent queer romances. Recommended!

People talk about the "Wayfarers series", but in most senses the books are quite unalike. One was a roadtrip story. One was about identity and bodies. This one is about sustainability, about a species finding its place, and visiting vs belonging (OK, so plenty of identity there at different levels, but in a different way to Orbit). They do have some things in common, apart from the universe they inhabit and a few characters. They are all relatively low-stakes stories: What's going on matters deeply to those involved, but most of the time they're not about to change the world. Certainly not save the world.

This book is... slices of life. It has lots of characters, which was hard to keep track of at first, and they don't all interact very strongly. It's effectively a series of vignettes looking into parts of life in the Exodus Fleet (a series of generation ships upon which much of humanity embarked when Earth couldn't support them any more). Quite a lot of thought has gone into how things might work in an obviously-closed system, where what you have with you is all that you have for centuries. And because this is Chambers, as much thought has gone into the social implications as the technical.

Unlike the books that came before, although the stakes of the story are low, the scope of the backstory is gigantic. It's about the near-extinction of humanity, and then our species finding a place in the galaxy, seen through the eyes of normal folk. This, combined with the sustainability aspects that are meaningful for me, hit me quite hard. It was one of those books where every so often there was a gut punch, and I had to stop reading and reflect.

This second instalment is quite different to the first. The author acknowledges this in her afterword, thanking her editor for "letting me follow an English manor house book about vulnerability and wallpaper with a bubbly Wodehousian romp". That's perhaps a slight exaggeration, but it does have a less cautious and slightly less realistic feel to things, while maintaining the really nice magic system, and most of the quality of characterisation of the first book. The characters here do feel like they have less time/space to be developed here, but perhaps that fits with the time that they have to understand each other, given that the whole story happens over just a few days. It certainly avoids the first book's slow pacing at the start.

It feels as though if you took A Marvellous Light and mixed in a little bit of the Parasol Protectorate series, this might be the result.

Thoroughly enjoyed, in a different way to the first one.

This is a rare thing : a much-hyped book that lives up to its hype. And the title is, to my surprise, literal. It is a story about a spaceship, and its crew / family, taking a long voyage to a small plant with angry people on it.

And thus, the best way I can describe the first 2/3 of the book is that it's a roadtrip story! They travel through space, stuff happens, they meet people, we get to know them, relationships evolve, and so forth. It's good. It invites comparison to Firefly, just because of the crew/family thing, though it's not that close otherwise. It's SF about people rather than the big picture, although there is plenty of good worldbuilding going on in the background; SF that can be good, and fun, without gigantic stakes.

It doesn't (at least to me) have the level of depth and layering that Psalm did some years later, but that's OK. It's really good.

It would not be totally unfair to say that Kingfisher had extracted the paladin from the Clocktaur Wars books, the central romance from Swordheart, mashed them together, and written a new book around it.
It wouldn't be totally fair either : his backstory is very similar to the earlier paladin, but hers isn't the same as either of the other female protagonists.

I did spend some of my reading time thinking "I've read this before". But I didn't really mind. This is a new story around a partially-recycled relationship, and it has the usual Kingfisher level of humour, irreverance, etc, where she manages to combine sensitive and well-observed characterisation with consistently witty dialogue.

Also, of course, what I've come to recognise as the norm for this author: non-stereotypical fantasy protagonists, unremarked non-binary characters (less significant than Swordheart), and so forth.

A fun read, and I'll definitely move on to the rest of the trilogy. It comes after Swordheart in the universe's chronology, and there are some minor callbacks, and if you've read that and/or the Clocktaur books you'll understand more about the world - but this will stand alone just fine.

I kinda want to read the memoirs or autobiography of Bishop Beartongue.