A long, kind book about a small angry planet
This came to me by way of a coworker who said, without much preamble, that I should read the one about the tunnelling ship. It took two months for the library hold to come through, which is about standard for anything anyone recommends to me.
The setup is a working crew on a ship that punches wormholes for a living, and the plot is a long job that takes them somewhere dangerous. That is the frame. The book itself is much more interested in dinner, paperwork, gossip, and the small negotiations that let nine people from different species share a corridor for a year. If you have read a lot of science fiction where the interesting part is the crisis, this reads almost as a rebuke.
I want to be careful not to sell it as cosy and leave it there, because the word gets used as a synonym for weightless. There are real stakes in here, and a couple of chapters that land hard, particularly one late conversation about what a person owes to a body they did not choose. The trick is that the book earns those moments by spending its first two hundred pages making you fond of everyone. When something goes wrong, it goes wrong to people you know the coffee preferences of.
Where it wobbles: the crew is genuinely good to each other in a way that occasionally sands down the edges. Two characters who ought to have a serious conflict resolve it in a page and a half. I did not mind while reading, and minded slightly afterwards.
The worldbuilding is the kind I like, which is to say it arrives sideways. Nobody explains the political situation in a briefing. You learn what species dislike each other by watching who sits where. A whole history of a war is implied by a character being careful about which language they use for a place name.
Read it if you want a book that is pleasant company for a week. I have already put the next one in the series on hold, which puts it somewhere around October.