Fun story, strong characters, some disappointments

I enjoyed this book a lot, both in its story and in its narration. Oyebanji has crafted an interesting and persuasive world, and he has given deep and thoughtful attention to what might actually happen to people in their generation ships, the evolutions of these little micro-societies, the way that mission and culture can diverge. The experience of the socioeconomically marginalised is strongly presented here; the characters are interesting, flawed, and with some exceptions have enough depth and nuance to be compelling and complex.

Similarly, the narration by Kassam is, overall, a good fit for the story. His voice and accent really suits a society where historical ethnic divisions have collapsed into a melange, where the traditional faces and voices of White Guy Sci-Fi face into the crowd.

However, Kassam's occasional mispronounciations were both confusing and distracting at times, especially where he misjudges the cadence and rhythm of phrases and sentences, badly fumbling emphasis and stress. This didn't happen often, but it happened just enough to be bothersome.

Similarly, with the story, I was enjoying being swept into an action mystery, and was disappointed by the resolution of the plot, where so many tantalising threads and hinted complications of history were simply ignored and left dangling, unpursued. It seems to me that Oyebanji had set out to write a much more ambitious, much deeper mystery, and for whatever reason had had to wrap up his story into a much smaller, much less neat climax with a whole bunch of loose threads left behind. I really, really want to read the story that Ojenanji _intended_ to write; those dangling, unattended-to little mysteries that our heroes left behind in their wake kept me waiting for twists and revelations that never came.

Both the story and the narration are flawed, just enough to distract me a little from my enjoyment of both, but not so much that I won't be looking forward to more work from both of these names.

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