On board the generation ship Matilda (named for the Clotilda),[1] where the passengers have formed a society stratified along racial lines such that those with dark skin are relegated to lower-deck lives of servitude and harsh behavioral restrictions, Aster Gray is a lower-decks healer who must discover the hidden connection between her mother's suicide decades ago and the mysterious death of the ship's Sovereign.

[3] Kirkus Reviews considered the book "entertaining", calling the Matilda a "well-crafted world" and noting that the "refreshingly visible and vital" diversity of its population lessens the extent to which the dictatorial Sovereignty "feels like a familiar dystopic trope.

"[4] Publishers Weekly called it "stunning", but stated that the "worldbuilding by poetry" and "many layers of metaphor" may disappoint readers seeking hard science fiction.

[5] In Locus, Gary K. Wolfe commended Solomon's depiction of shipboard society as "sharply detailed and viscerally realized", with "characters so closely observed" and "individual scenes so tightly structured" that the book "achieves surprising power and occasional brilliance", and underlined Aster's "Heinleinesque" competence.

[7] Strange Horizons observed that the book's "Afrofuturist premise" is shaped by its "queer neuroatypical worldview" in that "all of the central characters are both gender-variant and neurodivergent", emphasizing that Aster's inability to understand figurative language and deception — and subsequent insistence on clear and unambiguous communication — "disrupts some of the more expected tropes of SF adventure narratives.