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Bright Shards picks up where Ascending left off, with Earth representative Avery Alcott and her Vardeshi crewmates on their alien spaceship the Pinion having gone through a traumatic experience but recovering and now approaching the “starhaven” Arkhati, a halfway point between Earth and Vardesh Prime, which is Avery’s destination. Avery is given the option to go on to Vardesh Prime with a different ship and crew but insists she wants to stay with her crew and friends from the Pinion, but on a new ship. She has a few weeks to enjoy all the fascinating things Arkhati offers as a long-existing permanent space port, plus she gets to see her friend Kylie, a fellow human she met during their intensive training period on Earth before venturing out into space on Vardeshi ships.
Being in human company as well as meeting many more Vardeshi and being able to explore so much of the alien culture on Arkhati is a mostly welcome change of pace, though Avery is eager to get back to the ship and her travels to the Vardeshi home planet.
As always, she goes back and forth on her perceptions of how well she is fitting in with an alien species, whether it’s being more fluent in their much more complex language or not offending the Vardeshi with her cultural differences or ignorance … or figuring out how to deal with her love for one of the alien crew members.
This book brings more conflicts into play than the first, which had more small interpersonal conflicts and just one large conflict that came to an exciting climax. Here, there are many more issues that come up, on the ships and the starport, and another setting that comes up unexpectedly. Many are still interpersonal, but there are more situations that involve danger and much uncertainty about not only Avery’s immediate future with the “exchange program” but the future of the relationship between the two worlds.
I enjoyed this story just as much or more than Ascending. I found myself completely immersed in this world that Meg Pechenick fleshes out with such detail and thoroughness. Learning about other cultures and languages on Earth is fascinating, so it’s even more fascinating and fun to dive into a story about a fictional alien culture. But the way Pechenick writes it, it doesn’t seem fictional; it seems very much like this is an account of one woman’s experience living and working with aliens. They learn from each other; they become friends; they have conflicts and figure out how to resolve them. I was sad when this book ended, especially because the third book isn’t out yet. I got to read the first two right next to each other, and I’ll be waiting eagerly to enjoy the third.
Rated: Moderate. There are four or five instances of strong language and occasional uses of moderate or mild language. Violence is fairly mild. Sexual content includes some references to sex happening but very little or no detail, and then one scene that has moderate detail.
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