#if you're gonna write a space opera at least have some variety

[katrani]

2025 Books: Sweep of Stars

I really really want to like this book. The story is interesting! The telling feels awkward though. And it is one of those things if I'm not sure if it's because it's from a style tradition that I'm not familiar with, or if it's just. Not that great of a book.

Basic idea is that it's a sci-fi book focusing on a relatively new community known as Muungano as they try to hold onto their ideals during a bit of a succession crisis. This is done through various viewpoints, people directly and indirectly involved in choosing new leadership, people trying to hold on and people trying to change things.

The execution of it is...... awkward, to my eyes.

So first off this book is only 350 pages long. And it has more than five PoV characters. Most are told in third-person limited but one is in second person, one in first, and one in first person plural (character using "we" or "us" for himself).

That makes it difficult to get any sense of depth to any of them. Which is especially frustrating because we have good ideas and set ups between them. Like:

This is the trouble with knowing one another so well: we risk being caught up in one another's petty dramas despite our best efforts.

That is a mentor picking up on their student feeling frustrated as someone else enters the room. Which could have led to some interesting stuff about how to get everyone agreeing to work towards the same goal, but all three characters basically head in different directions and don't interact again. Or:

"Barely." Yahya let the word bite deep and the silence that followed take root.

A husband talking to his estranged wife as their son is succumbing to illness, and her having to put her job duties ahead of her familial ones. That would be amazing to dig into, and it does inform much of Stacia's narration, but I feel like we don't get time to sit in the emotion of it.

Which you know, these multiple PoVs could work, if we had more interaction. See these two:

There was a story she needed to construct, to tell, to maybe even believe. One that would reach fruition only with the telling.

I dive back in, not allowing time for his ideas to land, much less take root and bloom.

Those are fascinating ways to come at conversations, thinking about them organically. But most of our characters wind up very isolated from each other, on different ships or planets, and it feels like there's very few group scenes to take advantage of the messiness that would come with the book making us sympathize with various characters.

Unless they're all supposed to be different aspects of Muungano as a whole as character, but that doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny because there's also a couple of characters who would be group viewpoints (an AI that is partitioned so everyone can connect with it, and a gal with cyborg stuff going on so that she can read data signals coming and going) but neither of them get a direct PoV.

The story has an interesting chapter-to-chapter pacing that I liked, where something will happen at the end of one chapter, we'll switch PoVs, and the second PoV character hears about the event from the end of the previous one midway through their own stuff. But it also suffers from very little interaction. Everything is happening because of one event, one leader dying, but any other cause and effect feels very... abstracted? The pacing within scenes can be hard to follow too. Either dialogue is broken up with a line of narration, that is treated as a separate paragraph, so it's unclear who is speaking when the dialogue starts back up. Or we have events A B C happen, and we don't actually get the 3 part of event B. Especially with about a third of the book being action, I could not follow the details of what was happening.

The worldbuilding is mostly nice but parts of it leave me a bit confused. Mostly character timeline things? They mention that people live a while longer than they do irl currently, but not how much more- like, what is considered old now? What is considered young? One of our characters is just going through a ceremony to get an adult chosen name for herself, but we don't know if she's a teenager or in her 20s or in her 30s. I would've guessed 20s, except her childhood friend is old enough to have done childhood friend things, run off to (college?), and now has a child of her own who is presumably in his teens based on his plot. Which would imply they're both in their 30s, which is fine, except I don't know if I should be reading that as a new normal for adolescence or if Amachi is supposed to be read as too immature. And said childhood friend's husband is an "older man" but we don't know how old here- like, should we be thinking childhood friend got taken advantage of, or just that there must be a funny story to how she met her husband? I don't know! And that makes it hard to relate to things.

Also except for pronoun differences, all the characters talk the same. I could pick out three of the 15ish characters based on their word choices alone, everyone else is kind of interchangeable.

I will not be picking up the sequels to this specifically but I'd be willing to give the author another try.