****all spoilers****

Kicks off with a doomed gig to disciple an unruly colony and ends on the very same colony except now everyone is war torn!
I read this book non stop for a week and cried twice. I don’t even cry with books. 

The 30 year time jump was handled well enough - wish there was more hinting at what we missed in the inbetween years but it wasn’t completely missing

A good start to the final 3-book sequence in the Expanse. It takes place a couple of decades after the last instalment and again follows the crew of the Rocinante and other players in political playing field. The pace and switching POVs stimulated me to keep on reading. 

All in all a good book in the expanse series and for fans of space-operas

**an attempt by me to start writing reviews for as a new years resolution**

This book started out rough for me given the 30-year time skip. The previous books hadn't really discussed how aging worked, and we know from the last book that

Fred died in his 70s

so it seemed odd to have our characters around that age. I was also not convinced by the fact that Alex's "past 30 years" story involved

him getting married again, because I felt his journey in book 5 was understanding that he was not good at being a husband and should not try it again. So it was really weird to have that be a plot point.

One thing I'm sort of disappointed they didn't touch on is Filip ever finding Naomi again. I'm hoping they leave that for a last-book surprise, since she thinks he's dead, but it could just be that he never comes back.

I was also surprised by

Holden being willing to leave the Rocinante, because the ship was so much part of his identity. Though Naomi mentioned having thought of arguments for him to retire, she never did have to pull them out, and I expected her to.

Once I got past the weirdness of the time skip, though, I did really enjoy the book. I didn't love Drummer as a narrator—her character fell a little flat for me—and it was weird to suddenly get other <I>Rocinante</I> crewmembers as narrators in the last 1/3rd of the book. I especially enjoyed Amos' storyline; <spoilers>having an emotional arc for him was touching and it made Clarissa's death that much harder.

Recommend? Yes; it takes a bit of adjustment in the first few chapters with the time skip, but it's an excellent story and I enjoyed the central conflict here a lot.