On first reading, I found this a pleasant and enjoyable experience, and sufficiently gripping that I read the whole thing at one sitting, which I don’t normally do these days.

A few strangers of different species (none of them human) meet at the interstellar equivalent of a motorway service area while travelling in different directions for different reasons; they’re kept there longer than expected, and they interact with each other. Initially they sometimes distrust, offend, or disagree with each other; but they each have their own personal problems, and they end up helping each other with these problems. It’s rather charming that they’re all basically well-meaning: there are no villains in this story.

There’s no sex, no violence, no weapons are present, no-one dies, no crimes are committed, no scientific discoveries or technological innovations or social revolutions occur. At the end of the story, the galaxy remains entirely unchanged except that the characters we meet know and like each other better than they did at the beginning.

These well-meaning characters include representatives of the Akarak and Quelin species, which were presented as hostile and dislikeable in [b:The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet|25201920|The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)|Becky Chambers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438590529l/25201920._SY75_.jpg|42270825]. Presumably the message is to beware of generalizations: any large group of beings may contain some good and some bad individuals, however you define good and bad.

I’m not quite sure why I like this book so much, but by now I’ve decided that it’s my favourite of the Wayfarers series, even though not very much seems to happen in it. Well, in fact, all kinds of things happen in it, they’re just on a more intimate scale than we’re accustomed to in sf stories. There are major things happening here, but they affect individuals, not whole societies, and for a reader of sf that takes a bit of getting used to.

As in most sf stories, the aliens have brains that seem human-equivalent: they’re about as intelligent as humans, and they behave much as humans might behave if they’d grown up with non-human bodies in a non-human society. If we ever encounter real intelligent aliens from other solar systems, it seems unlikely to me that their mental functioning will be so familiar and readily understood by humans. However, genuinely alien mentalities would be hard for the author to imagine and describe, and probably hard for human readers to appreciate and enjoy.

Could you read this fourth book in isolation, without the rest of the series? Probably, yes. It would be somewhat helpful to have read the first book in the series ([b:The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet|25201920|The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)|Becky Chambers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438590529l/25201920._SY75_.jpg|42270825]), which provides some context, but I don’t think it’s essential. The second and third books don’t contribute anything to this one, as far as I can see.

Once again, another fantastic story in the Wayfarers series which makes me wish that there was still more to come from this world and characters. It was good to get a new story with some familiar characters (Pei) and some new ones too.

I loved the interactions between the whole cast, the little events that happened along the way and the world that we were introduced to once again.

I don't know how she does it. Again, and again, and again. There is more said within this story, devoid of plot as it is, than in many epics. Brilliant.