I only discovered Becky Chambers at the beginning of the year from her Wayfarer series, and I felt like I had struck a gold mine. I immediately devoured the entire series and her Monk and Robot novellas, completely drawn in by her beautifully-built worlds, emotional story-telling and wholesome relationships that the characters develop.
While I love gritty, expansive sci-fi, Becky Chambers is a refreshing palette cleanser that gives a sense of optimism and warm fuzzy feeling not always found in the genre. So when I found out she was releasing a new book, I didn’t even read the synopsis. I knew I wanted to read As You Wake, Break the Shell as soon as I could and was sure I would love it. And so, I dove in completely blind. This turned out to be a mistake on my part that may have unfortunately influenced my experience with this book.
First of all, this is primarily a cosy romance story set in space, and romance surprisingly isn’t something Chambers’ focuses on in her other books. Now, I don’t mind a good love story when it’s a sidenote in a book, but it’s not a genre or plot point that I particularly enjoy, so I wanted to preface my review with this for full disclosure, as I will be massively biased here.
We first learn about the planet Fortune, which is an isolated colony planet that is far from a paradise. The lore is that anyone could start their own colony and were given the resources to get started, but were then left to fend for themselves. There is a mothership supposedly out there somewhere and these colonies can rejoin the planetary network again, but the caveat is that they must make their own way there, and figure out space travel for themselves. It’s an interesting premise, and although this is a unique plot point to this book, the ideology behind this policy feels like a familiar part of Chambers’ writing.
The biggest plot mechanic is the alternating timelines where we jump forward to some undisclosed point in the future. This is perhaps the story-telling I struggled most with. It becomes clear very quickly that our two main characters are indeed happily married and thriving years later (this isn’t a spoiler, you find out within a few pages), which is great news for lovers of happy endings, but when the focus of the story is the romance, this takes any kind of suspense away from the story as we already know the outcome. The time jump did have some wonderfully poetic writing, and I got the feeling Chambers was using this as a good excuse to experiment with her writing, but it did leave me wondering what purpose the time jump really served.
Now onto our characters. We follow our two characters’ perspectives, Signy and Cora; Cora is a pilot who brings in vital water supplies for Fortune. Pilots in this universe have managed space travel by bonding with an alien species called the rorqual, and this is a highlight of the book. There’s some really strong ideas and world-building around this species and how it functions within society, including the impact on both pilot and roqual, and I especially enjoyed the bond that Cora has with her rorqual, Colibri. Then we have Signy, who is a botanist, and runs an illegal workshop to make much-needed medicine for the ailing citizens of planet Fortune, and she of course has a very strong moral compass. There ends up being a lot of exposition about plants, which would have been interesting if it was alien plants, but they were all plants native to earth (I definitely did not need a lengthy child-level explanation of what a squash is, thank you very much). And then, when our characters meet, sparks fly and there is little doubt that these two are going to be together.
Now for the plot… Well, there really isn’t one, not until the last 10% of the book, where suddenly the stakes are raised from 0 to100, feeling a little rushed given the length of the book, and mostly included to signify a second book. While Chambers’ books are often plot-adjacent, with character development and world-building being at the forefront, this book felt different. The plot is Signy and Cora’s romance, and while some events happen throughout the book, the focus is always back on the budding romance, and while the romance is lovely, there is a distinct lack of conflict. Problems are communicated perfectly, any issues are resolved breezily, and with the visions into the future, any will-they-won’t-they suspense is removed.
Some readers will take a lot of comfort in the wholesome love story and lack of conflict, it is a queer romance escapist story at its finest. It’s not uncommon for Chambers’ characters to border on sickly-sweet, but she often manages to balance it with quirks and flaws that still make them believable. But unfortunately these two characters feel so perfect in all ways, that it did take the relationship past an element of believability for me. This is where my former disclosure comes in; while I think some readers will absolutely love this, the lack of plot and suspense struggled to hold my attention, and the main characters feel a little too perfect for me to relate to.
This is also Chambers’ longest book, and I couldn’t help but feel her strength is in more concise story-telling, I’m not sure we gained anything by having more pages to this story. As You Wake, Break the Shell feels like an experiment or a bridge between Chambers’ evolving writing style. It is far more poetic than her previous books, and there’s a lot of clever use of formatting throughout the book to enhance this.
I got the distinct feeling something had changed for Chambers, and upon reading her author’s notes, we find out this is very much the case. She experienced the devastating loss of her brother and says she struggled to write at all, and I suspect that her leaning even further into the cosiness of this book may have, very understandably, been influenced by what she was going through.
Overall, I mostly did enjoy this book, which may come as a surprise as I fear this review leaned towards the negative. And that’s why I felt it so important to contextualise my own reading preferences. It’s difficult to overcome preconceptions of what to expect from an author when you have fallen in love with their writing and were expecting more of the same, only to find it has changed.
For me, Chambers’ appeal is that she’s managed to bridge a genre gap; her scifi is strong enough to still lure in lovers of the genre, but accessible enough to draw in people who would have never have touched scifi before. For me, this book leans into one side more than the other, and that side just isn’t for me – and that’s OK! I believe this book will massively divide fans, those craving gentle storytelling with wholesome romance as a focus will likely fall in love with this book, other readers who are craving expansive interstellar world-building may find this a slow, less gripping read. Ultimately, it depends which camp you fall into that may determine how much you enjoy this book.
© 2026 Lydia Harris
Hardback | Hodderscape
AS YOU WAKE, BREAK THE SHELL, by Becky Chambers
October 2026 |480 pages
ISBN: 978-1529340587
