As You Wake, Break The Shell - Becky Chambers

Told in alternating timelines, As You Wake, Break the Shell is a heartfelt and hopeful story from the award-winning author exploring what it means to be human and come together. Set on the harsh, poisonous planet of Fortune

As You Wake, Break the Shell might seem like a sci-fi novel at first glance, but at the heart of it it’s a story about love, family, grief and the importance of those around you shaping you and the very far future becomes an opportunity to examine many aspects of life today. Signy runs a plant shop on Fortune, while secretly helping people with illegall biomedicine. Cora pilots enormous creatures called rorquals. Their relationship over two different points in their life form the foundation of the novel. As You Wake, Break the Shell’s narrative switches between the start of their relationship and the eventual outcome rather frequently. Chapters are short, the book regularly switches perspective and point in time. It may seem a bit to jumpy at first but it is really interesting to see how the early stages of these characters’ lives compare to their latter stages. Some of the best stuff is the worldbuilding stuff though. How humanity continues to carry pieces of earth with them, even as each new generation doesn’t experience that planet itself. It’s full of plants and seasons and traditions which they try to hold on to amidst survival efforts in a completely different place than home. This book focuses around growth, recognising things that contain you, identifying those that assist your growth and understanding the nature of ‘family’ itself. Sometimes family is found through blood, sometimes down the road we identify those that share our journey’s path, sometimes it resides with those we’ve lost. It’s quite literally a book about love and grief, two pretty complex emotions which are explored deeply within these pages. This is part one of a duology and it does leave some important threads dangling at the end. Becky Chambers has written something massive. Genetically engineered people, space colonies, giant creatures traversing the worlds! But she manages to keep everything incredibly personal at its core.