Sometimes a novella is just the right length, and sometimes it’s too short. Now you know that if that’s the line I’m opening with, this book was just too short to tell the story it wanted to tell.
“But AJ,” I hear you saying, my dear hypothetical reader, “aren’t you literally always complaining that books are too long?”
Yes, I am, but I reserve the right to be Goldilocksian in my reading, always searching for the book that is just right.
The problem with Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard is that it is a sci-fi romance novella. It’s always a challenge to make a romance story fit into a novella-length work, and it’s extra challenging when you’ve gotta also incorporate a sci-fi plot complete with some lore and worldbuilding. As with so much of romantasy, the end result is a book where all of the elements just end up feeling a little underdone.
This wasn’t a bad book, it just left so little of an impression on me that I’m having a hard time thinking of anything I want to say in the review. I just wish that it had been longer, so that the relationships — not just the romantic ones, but the friendly and antagonistic ones as well — would have had time to develop naturally, rather than the reader just having to accept it on fact when the narrator tells us that someone felt some kind of way about a person or situation.
Oddly, for such a short book, it also felt weirdly repetitive. Our two love interests each have a central hang-up that serves as the obstacle to the romance, and they each thought of that hang-up with an almost clockwork-like precision, to the point where I was inwardly saying “Yes, yes, I get it.”
This is the second book of de Bodard’s that I’ve read this year which just failed to land for me, so I think it’s time for me to take a break from this author. It’s a shame, because F/F space romance is a concept I really enjoy, but I need the romance to actually have time to breathe and grow.
CWs and TWs: Low-grade sci-fi violence and death. Note that this is a smooching-only romance story, so there is no sexual content.
Source and Format: I read this as an ebook from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Book Bingo Prompts
SBTB Summer Romance: Novella. Weirdly, as I was planning out my reading for this bingo challenge, I had a really hard time finding out whether or not this was a novella. I saw references to it being “short”, but the pre-release marketing seemed to actively avoid the word novella, as if Tordotcom possibly sensed that readers are tired of spending novel prices for 100 pages of story (allegedly the print version of this is 176 pages, so it must have a big font or wide margins). So I’m going to repeat myself: this is a novella! It is squarely within novella territory!
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 19 out of 25 prompts complete. 3 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 16 out of 25 prompts complete. 2 bingos.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 18 out of 23 prompts complete, 5 bingos.
SBTB Summer Romance: 6 out of 24 prompts complete, 0 bingos.