The Quiet Engine

I cried on a bus. The last hundred pages are why I read.

Yes, it's slow. Yes, the first act is basically a very well-written maintenance schedule. Hannah is not wrong about page 190. But Teague is doing something with the slowness — you're meant to feel three generations of routine so that when the routine breaks, you break with it. I didn't know I cared about these people until I badly did.

Half a star off for the first act. Everything after is close to perfect. I'll say why behind the warning.

A generation ship story that actually thinks about generations — who fixes the water plant when the people who built it are dead, and how you teach a child to care about a destination nobody alive will see.

The book is 520 pages and I'd argue about 60 of them. That's a good ratio for the genre. Teague has clearly read the engineering and, more unusually, the sociology. The middle generation's slow loss of purpose is the best thing in it.

Four. If Hannah's complaint is that nobody wants anything, I'd say that's the point, and also that it takes 190 pages to become the point, which is a fair complaint.

Stopped at page 190. Beautifully built and nobody in it wanted anything.

I gave it a fair shot — 190 pages is more than a third and more than I give most books. The ship is wonderful. The water plant is wonderful. I could draw you the corridor layout. But every character I met was content, and content people are a hard thing to build a novel around. I kept waiting for someone to want something they couldn't have, and I was still waiting when my library hold expired.

I'm not rating it, because I didn't read it. I'm telling you where I got off, and that Priya and Tomasz say the part after is the point. It might be. I'd rather be honest than finish out of stubbornness.