Finished this! I thought this book was ... fine. It felt more like a demonstration of worldbuilding than like a novel for the first chunk. Having the characters all come together over their concern for Tupo also felt a little bit cheesy or contrived, and the fact that there's briefly conflict only for the characters to say "I respect your differences" and then just put it aside was kind of unsatisfying. I did like that Pei made the decision not to have a child, and instead to go to Ashby, and I thought it was cool that Speaker and Tracker got to see what being on a planet felt like, but overall I didn't connect as deeply with this book as I have with some of the others from the series. Still glad to have read the series though! Always rewarding to see what other people are reading and talking about, and this one has been getting a lot of traction lately.
I will say, I do totally appreciate the importance of books like this, that are relatively popular and demonstrate ways that characters or people of different cultures might communicate, try to make sense of one another, and generally wish each other well.
