I have never loved a set of characters more. They feel so real. The book was about a small private dome filled with kindness and people learning about eachother and understanding eachother. There were so many beautiful moments and I couldn't have asked for a better ending to this series.

Started a little slow but ended so strong. I laughed, I cringed, I gasped, and I cried. A brilliant way to end my new favourite series.

I'm sad that Becky Chambers' brilliant Wayfarers series has come to an end.
 
This series filled as it is with love, compassion, and kindness, is a soothing balm in an increasingly unkind world ‐ and this final book in the quartet is no different.

This is not a book to read if you want fast-paced action, because beyond the brief triggering incident that brings the main characters together, not a lot actually happens.

These books are all about humanity, and it's such a clever idea of Chambers to use aliens as a conduit to explore its many facets.

Galaxy is about family, about doing what makes you happy, about learning to disagree respectfully, about the beauty in everyday life.

I loved it.

A compact conclusion to an expansive series, taking place in a limited area of one small planet over the course of five days and involving only five characters for the vast majority of the book, yet retaining the sense of vastness and diversity of the galaxy built up in previous books and exemplified by the unlikely group we encounter in book 4. I especially enjoyed having an Akarak POV character. This disabled anarchocommunist bird woman has my whole heart. Becky Chambers has created a unique species with a tragic history of colonization and cultural genocide, now living on the fringes in a fascinating social structure. The contrast with having an Aeluon POV character (recurring from book 1!) allowed for especially nuanced cultural and political commentary. And of course, Roveg the Quelin is an icon, the party-hosting, food-offering, considerate exile artist we all wish we had in our lives. I'd like to be his friend please and thank you. As always, Becky Chambers develops complex analyses and critiques of the world she has created that are unique to this scifi universe as well as mapping onto our own world.

It's been so long since I read the previous books in the Wayfarers series that I only have vague impressions of them. However, since we're jumping in with a new cast of characters that's only tangentially related to the prequels, I didn't feel lost. 

If this book was a TV episode, I'd call it a bottle episode: The main characters all ended up stuck together for the majority of the book. The conflict was largely interpersonal/internal, and fairly low-stakes, which is in line with this series/Becky Chambers' work in general. The driving idea was that vulnerability can bring people together, and even individuals who disagree with each other on major points (and may not ever agree) can learn from each other. I enjoyed spending the brief few days with these characters, watching how they had interactions that would change the course of their lives—maybe in subtle ways, but in lasting ones. This was a gentle and hopeful read full of the idea that people can come together to help each other when times are hard.

I didn't expect to like this book even better than the other three, but it is probably my favourite one in this series. Although I suppose it could be read as a standalone, the careful world building over the three previous books really pays off. The plot is minimal: five very different people are stranded on a remote planet for a few days and get to know each other. This may not sound like a gripping story, but I was absorbed and I feel like the characters are my friends now. 
My only complaint is that this is seemingly the last book in the series. I would read many more.