Becky Chambers books have that wonderful duality of making me feel both curious and assured. They are books that comfort the soul and expand the mind, asking us to look at our human experience through new lenses while also offering something so authentically healing it is easy to forget we're reading about alien races and futuristic worlds. In AS YOU WAKE, BREAK THE SHELL, we're given a stronger focus on romance than Chambers has offered in the past, and she portrays the love story between Cora and Signy beautifully against a backdrop of her ever-insightful and intriguing world-building.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this ARC for review.

This is the first book in a new duology from Becky Chambers, and contains many of her trade-mark themes: cosy world-building, heavy on characterisation rather than plotline, found family, loss and hope, community and survival.

The Monk and The Robot books were just too gentle and cosy for me, but I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting to. While it won't satisy anyone who prefers more science and space action in their sci-fi, there are some really intriguing elements. Especially the rorquals. The relationship between Cora and her rorqual Colibri was just as wonderful and heartwarming as the central romance. I greatly enjoyed both Cora and Signy individually and together, and although the dual timeline was disorienting at first it ended up flowing beautifully by the end - which I should mention is a total (and unexpected to me) cliffhanger! Come for the struggling colony on a hostile planet and sapphic romance, and stay for the rorquals, botanical expositions and recipes.

This book was pure poetry. I don’t even know how to do it justice in a review, except to say that it spoke to me and moved me in ways I didn’t know possible.
This was my first book by Becky Chambers (a shame, I know), and this is so far my favourite read of the year. The way she was able to mix scifi and high stakes with a beautiful love story? I still can’t comprehend how she made that happen, but honestly this book was perfectly written, and beautiful and also sad in so many ways, I can’t wait to read the next, and I will go binge all of her works as soon as I can.
The love story between Signy and Cora was beautifully written, and the found family aspects of the plot were amazingly done. I can already say that this is a book I’ll re-read until the end of times.

I always find it harder to write a coherent review about books I loved - and that's definitely the case here. I think As You Wake, Break the Shell is one of perhaps 3 true five-star reads so far this year (it's June). In some ways, it feels like a culmination of themes in Becky Chambers' work so far - the emotional power and deep hope of Monk and Robot, alongside the social and scientific considerations of Wayfarers. Not to sound too over the top, but this book is honestly a bit of a masterpiece. The emotions in the text are real and, perhaps most importantly, complex - the acknowledgements / author's note at the end brought this home further, and really moved me. I enjoyed the almost mixed-media approach - the reader is met with multiple POVs and different narrative styles, alongside snippets of conversation and even recipes. Cora and Signy's relationship was beautiful to watch grow - it felt so helpful.
I loved the rorqual in general, and Colibri in particular - I found myself empathising with her point of view a lot (perhaps strangely!)
In short: Becky Chambers remains a wonder, and I can't wait to read whatever she writes next - no matter how distant in the future that may be.

I hadn’t realised how much I had missed Becky Chambers’s writing until I got into As you Wake, Break the Shell; it was like easing back into a comfortable pair of shoes, sitting an old favourite armchair.

I have been a fan of her work since first reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and have never yet been disappointed, but this may well be a new favourite. We see 2 characters across 2 points in their lives — in their future, where they have been together for a couple of decades, and in their past, when they first meet and fall for eachother. Clearly a lot has happened between their meet-cute and them being a middle-aged couple in a different location and finding out some of how they get there was really good fun; I had forgotten how witty Chambers’s writing can be.

Her worldbuilding is, as always, superb. We are introduced to a sentient beast-of-burden species, one of whom I love just as much as our deuteragonists, and a colony seeded from a distant corporation and the details Chambers puts into this setting make it feel very real.

Genuinely my only complaint is that it was only as we approached the end of the book that I realised it is the 1st half of a new duology. Not only do I have to wait for the 2nd half to be released but, as I had the privilege of reading an ARC from NetGalley, I even have to wait for this book to be released 😂

For anyone who already loves Becky Chambers, this book will delight you. For anyone who has yet to discover her work, this is yet another wonderful, compelling entry-point into her work. If you even slightly enjoy hopepunk as a concept, I recommend this book to you in the strongest terms.

I loved this, so it may come as a surprise that I'm going to disagree with most of the other reviews so far. Granted, I only skimmed them, but most of them state that As You Wake, Break the Shell feels like a comforting, warm hug.

It doesn't. It really, really doesn't.

As You Wake, Break the Shell is not a comfort. It's a sharp twist in your stomach, a small pinprick in your heart as you realize something is wrong. It's a dying houseplant, it's sunlight on hardwood floors, it's childlike wonder while looking at a cloudless star-strewn sky, it's the feeling of falling in love with space but knowing you'll never have the smarts to get anywhere close to them, it's watching your pet get old, it's your mother's smile as she tends to her favorite orchid, it's having a chronic illness that doesn't endanger your life but still has no cure. It's your sister moving to the opposite end of the country, it's growing up and leaving the house but always looking back over your shoulder.
It is wishing you could go back, and the cold that floods your system as you realize that you cannot.

So, yeah, to summarize all of that: This book is so complex. While reading, I found myself marvelling at the depths of Becky Chambers's imagination and creativity. I just simply cannot comprehend how a human mind can come up with stuff like this. The description of the rorqual, an animal/spaceship hybrid central to the story, left me unable to breathe for a while. I legitimately had to put the book down and stare at a blank wall for a couple of minutes. I was BREATHLESS at some points of this book. Like, yeah, sure, some parts are universal to stories, and some stuff is cozy space/gardening lesbians falling in love, but some part felt almost earth-shattering to me. I was so close to tears multiple times. And I cannot even summarize what this book is being about, except maybe LOVE. Love, family, loss, grief, tears, pain, hope - oh, so much hope.

I haven't really checked out a lot of Chambers's stuff before, except for the Monk & Robot series, which, while lovely, can't possibly come anywhere close to how THIS BOOK altered the chemistry of my brain. I wish I was exaggerating, I really wish I was. This broke my brain in some way that will take some time to unravel.
All in all, this made me feel so many emotions I cannot possibly name and quantify. I could go on gushing forever - but this is my review, and I want to end it now. I'm gonna think of this a lot. I also can't believe I now have to wait for the sequel. Never have I ever wanted one more desperately.

Read this. Go on the journey.
Hold on tight.

I think what I like most about Becky Chambers' books is that you immediately accept whatever world she places you in. From the start of this one, Cora and Signy felt familiar, like old friends, and I accepted their lives without querying what was happening and why. And whilst this is sci-fi, and I loved Colibri the Rorqual, and I was wondering about the world and what was happening, really this was a book about love and about family.
I feel like I learned a lot, too, about seeds and plants, and there are even some recipes sprinkled in there...
Heads up that it ends on a cliff-hanger (that I was totally unprepared for, even though I knew this was book 1 of 2). But because the book slips between timelines I didn't totally freak out because I knew, at least partially, what was coming.
I basically inhaled the whole thing it was so easy and lovely to read. Looking forward to part 2!
I was so excited to get this one!

This was such an easy five star read from the reigning queen of cosy sci-fi. Signy and Cora are two women living in a dystopian future on a planet off Earth. For some reason huge ships were sent from Earth with the provisions to enable generations of humans to be born and live on a distant planet-but this planet comes with its own problems to be worked around. Cora is a rorqual pilot-she is connected essentially telepathically to a giant creature unlike anything we know. The pair of them work together to collect more resources such as ice so that people living on the planet of Freedom can have sufficient drinking water. Signy runs a plant shop where she illegally modifies the genetic code of plants to make medicine for people the government have deemed as too much of a drain on the limited resources available-such as heart medication for an elderly man who lives across the street. This is such a lovely story of the growth of a relationship between two people and their wider social circles and aside from the found family aspect there is a mystery going on in the background that is touched upon but not fully uncovered-roll on book two!