The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway

In a nut shell, I loved this book. Written in 2020 it was nice to hear from Janeway herself about herself. Most of the book is about Janeway's childhood and family. I listened to the audio book so having "Janeway" reading her own book was very comforting.

Now, the book does talk about her time from the Delta Quadrant but it's more of a summation of years and the outstanding facts not in the logs ("shows"). It also gives her side of the story, right or wrong, of some of her actions during her time there. It does not go into too much detail. And that is the unfortunate part. There is a balance the editor Una McCormack had made in how the stories of Janeway's life are written. Everything is a bit of a summary. Though the details in her early life are there; there is still a summation view over the years. But that was the only downside.

I loved listening to Janeway talk about her life, her decisions, her disappointments, and heartaches. But also, to her challenges and how she rose to meet them to become the Starfleet Captain, now Admiral.

The first two books in this series, the "autobiographies" of Kirk and Picard, are at once faithful and transformative accounts of those characters' lives. So I was very much looking forward to reading this one, about the captain of perhaps my favorite crew in Trek.

This "autobiography," though, relied much more on nostalgia to carry the book than to set a course for the book's own story to play out. It gives a remarkable tour of Janeway's pre-"Caretaker" life, with insights and introspection aplenty; but once we join the story of the ill-fated Voyager as told in the TV show, much of the juiciest and most interesting thoughts and insights a real Janeway might've been able to bring to the story are glossed over, ignored completely, or dismissed behind an "it's classified" or "it's personal." It seems to have been written from a perspective a decade or two after "Endgame," yet offers nothing in the way of reflection upon her role in the events of Star Trek: Nemesis or what happened to a couple of her notable crew members before the events of Star Trek: Picard, or indeed the change in Starfleet culture that precede that show. The Kirk and Picard "autobiographies" fill in the gaps between what we saw on screen, in addition to giving some pre- and post-series context that this book was lacking a bit.

The book certainly isn't bad, by any stretch of the imagination; but having read McCormack's fantastic Picard prequel novel "The Last Best Hope," I was hoping to see more of Janeway's life laid bare. The book is certainly what a real Janeway would've written, but I was hoping for a bit more than that.