As You Wake, Break the Shell

About halfway through this book I thought "here it is, a story that's finally too cozy for me". I like cozy! But I also like sci-fi. And a big chunk of this book is a very detailed, very sweet narrative about two women falling in love. Reading it I thought maybe the author had had the same experience and just had to write it down. That's a compliment! It feels very real and true. Just wasn't quite sure if there was any room left for a sci-fi novel.

There is, and it gets to the sci-fi towards the end. Actually it's all throughout the book, the world building is magnificent. Elliptical and introduced throw show-not-tell, but quite deep and intriguing.

I was less excited about the primary sci-fi element of the book, the space whale Colibri. The author's trying to write a complicated thing, a non-human intelligence and a only barely-recognizable rapport with humans. That makes for some elliptical writing in a style that I found annoying to read at length. But it's well enough done and common for this kind of novel, I'm not sure how else it could have been written. Also that alienness ends up being an important plot point that works because Chambers set it up from the start.

This book is definitely the first of a two parter and I'm looking forward to the the conclusion of the story.