Light Years From Home by Mike Chen

 

This cover text on this book promises much more of a novel of pursuit than the covers actually contain, but this is otherwise a reasonably interesting book. There's like a hundred pages--maybe more--of the sort of intra-family drama that ends with you not really liking anyone, but that's just setup for the things that happen toward the end of the novel. The climax is not some chase resolution, or even really external/violent action, but the members of the family getting their shit sorted out and being able to move on with their lives as they should be. Well, two of them, anyway: One has her dementia relapse after a temporary magic-tech reprieve, and the other is off-planet fighting a desperate war. There was a stretch where I was seriously thinking the character just back from the extraterrestrial war might turn out to be entirely delusional, but this is in fact a SF novel, so that didn't turn out to be the case.