And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer

TL;DR: A great premise, but lacking overall for me.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much to the publisher!

Plot: A crew of humans attempting to take back protected artwork from curating aliens (and a lot of meandering through memories).
Characters: The worst part of this? The main character had so little to them, and the others weren’t great.
Setting: I wish we had more details about the setting and aliens but sadly no. A lot of potential.
Science Fiction: Again like the setting, a lot of this was lost in the meandering.

Summary:

For three hundred years, humanity’s greatest works of art have been on loan at the Greenwood Museum. It was finally time for them to come home…but the alien curators were disinclined to return them.

Force was out of the question. Earth’s government was they were not going to press the issue. So, all we had was guile and hubris to fuel our little intergalactic art heist.

My old friend Tarquin was our leader, but not the captain. That was Tchik-tchik, though whether Tchik-tchik was our insectoid pilot’s name or species is still unclear to me. Misora, with her extremely illegal biotech mods, was our muscle.

Jack was there to hack the security systems of the biggest museum in the galaxy. He was a sensynth, a sentient synthetic being, and the most powerful machine intelligence on Earth uncorrupted by alien technology.

My name is Fennel Tycho. I’d like to tell you I was there because of my expertise in Art History. Truth is, I was there because without me, Jack would not have agreed to go. He was notorious for being difficult to work with—but it was a mistake to think I could make things any easier.

Thoughts:

I’m super bummed on this one, I can’t lie. I’ve adored Molly Tanzer in the past, their work was fun and unique. But this one lacked so much that I was frustrated more than I was invested, and I was left wondering what the point was. We have a crew of humans off to fetch artwork from a museum planet that protects and houses it. The aliens took it after helping humanity save themselves, and then wouldn’t give it back. Sound familiar?

This one is directly inspired by the back and forth around the Elgin Marbles (I recommend looking it up). The long and short is that the marbles are being held outside their native land by the British who do not want to return them. In the same mode our characters are seeking our human artwork. There is a lot that could be unpacked from this. Unfortunately we spend the bulk of this story meandering through the memories and relationship (or lack thereof) that our PoV character has with a cloned individual.

We get lost in this frankly, and it ruins the overall scope of the story. Our main character is hung up this man, who seems to care little for them. So the narrative is following them chasing him around and getting caught up in this seemingly meaningless fetch quest. The world is sketched out and there is a lot of potential but it fell so very flat for me. A bummer overall.