A Closed and Common Orbit follows closely on the heels of Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but departs from the good ship Wayfarer to tell instead two coming-of-age stories that prove conjoined. One character is new: “Sidra”, a ship’s AI who for plot reasons needed to be removed from the ship and transferred into a highly illegal body kit. She is joined by Pepper, a tech whom we met in Long Way and who found the illegal body kit to begin with, agrees to house and help Sidra learn to function within Galactic Community society without giving away her identity as a synthetic lifeform. In the novel’s other track, we meet “Jane 23”, a genetically-bred slave girl living in a society where genetically-enhanced humans live in comfort and splendor on the labor of girls like Jane. As the book develops, an accident will arouse Jane 23’s curiosity about the world outside of her factory, and she will make her escape from the robots who control her and come of age living in a defunct junkyard shuttle with a nurturing AI. This track proves to be Pepper’s origin story, and makes her bond with Sidra all the more interesting: they are both manufactured beings whose very lives provoke an existential crisis. As both characters are dealing with these questions and getting into trouble — readers are also getting a fresh and heavy dose of Chambers’ worldbuilding as we get more familiar with Port Coriol, which is a bit like a smuggler’s planet sort of area. This was a very different book than Long Way, but I enjoyed its sharp character focus even more, even without Kizzy! Definitely planning on continuing with Chambers and this series, but want to focus on le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness first.