I'm on maybe my 5th? read of this series. Ive found that this first book is a lot like Alanis Morissette's first album. All the people who would love it found it first and loved it, but it got so popular that then errrbody kind of had to try it. Murder mysteries about old people in the British suburbs aren't for everybody. But man, each of these books get me in the feels every time. Maybe the character complexity keeps me coming back? Maybe their character growth (at 80!) is what does it for me. Maybe just the witticisms and ironic set pieces (the anchor of which is Joyce's diary, obvs). But it feels like watching the best Friends or Seinfeld episodes over again.

I read this book on a cruise and think its more or less a perfect cruise book. The characters are pretty unsubtle, there are some weird, incongruous interactions, and the plot is kind of very forecastable - but there is some touching dialogue and overall it moves right along and delivers what you'd want. This really felt like a slightly smarter Hallmark movie turned book and I'm here for it. Don't think there needs to be a sequel, but if there was I'd probably pack it for my next cruise.

I got stuck on this book in places. I think it's because the book is really about the characters and their interactions and not really about the plot, so relative to other scifi books I've read, little actually happened. There wasn't like, a relationship between the plot unfolding and the characters transforming, although some of that did happen. This really felt like the pilot of a situational TV drama about the multispecies crew of a space ship where, unlock Star Trek, for example, they didn't necessarily discover anything during the show, other than their infinite capacity to empathize and care for each other. Whereas Star Trek did that 5-10% of the time, this book is on that maybe 70-80% of the time. I enjoyed it, will likely take a small break to visit a past indulgence before moving onto book two, and will recommend it to fellow readers with caveats about it being pretty non-traditional for most contemporary scifi.