A Closed and Common Orbit

This is the 2nd installment in Becky Chambers' "Wayfarer" series, which began with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.  This book continues the world building and species building that Chambers seems to excel at. This time, we look into the back story of Pepper, a somewhat minor character in the first book, and the origin story of the successor to Lovey, the sentient AI who ran the Wayfarer in the previous book.When an attack on the Wayfarer ends in the destruction of Lovey, a new AI in the same series is installed but causes so much grief among the crew that she is uninstalled and another model takes her place. The new Lovey is transferred into a human body kit, which is totally illegal, and accompanies Pepper back to the port city of Coriol, where Pepper runs a technology and space gear repair shop. In alternating chapters, we learn of Pepper's childhood as a cloned child slave in a salvage factory, her escape from the factory, her rescue by another AI on a wrecked ship in the salvage yard, and her escape from the planet a decade later. Back in the present, the new Lovelace model AI has chosen the name Sidra and is trying to figure out how to fit in and not get identified as an AI. Both of the story lines present issues to think about and characters who touch the reader. 

Reviewers praised this sequel with Publishers Weekly praising "Chambers's clean, careful prose and beautiful pacing and structure [that] keep the narrative engrossing from beginning to end." Library Journal asserts that, "the power of Chamber's second space opera is in her appealing characters. ...Her protagonists might not all be human, but they possess more humanity than most." The Guardian offers this assessment: "Chambers is particularly deft when it comes to getting the reader inside Sidra’s new consciousness: from initial panicky claustrophobia through a convincing and moving process of self-discovery and awareness. The novel is compelling in its portrait of Pepper coming to terms with her past, but the real star of the show is Lovelace."