On a dusty backwater planet, occasional thief Jun Ironway has gotten her hands on the score of a lifetime: a secret that could raze the Kindom, the ruling power of the galaxy.
A star system away, preternaturally stoic Chono and brilliant hothead Esek— the two most brutal clerics of the Kindom—are tasked with hunting Jun down.
And tracking all three across the stars is a ghost from their shared past known only as Six. But what Six wants is anyone’s guess. It’s a game of manipulation and betrayal that could destroy them all. And they have no choice but to see it through.
This has all the elements that make good space opera: extensively detailed world, with a variety of places and a variety of cultures; an overbearing, dystopian empire, with complex internal politics; characters who are unreasonably competent in their villainy; space pirates; space hackers; space sapphic romance.
Some of the plot twists feel a bit too twisty, but are more palpable given the context of the general vibe the setting has (which is established in a satisfactory manner). At times, the main characters feel a bit too constantly competent, often relegating other characters to the roles of bumbling fools, or passing redshirts. The book works as the kind where that happens, but given the quality of worldbuilding otherwise, it would have been nice to have more nuance in this area.
Starts off in a stock fantasy of clerics and assassins, and clearly riffing on some familiar themes of space classics, but as this thriller's clever use of flashback and recall keeps weaving a strong set of character relationships and loyalties in unflinching intrigue, the wide-ranging story pulls off a lot of sharp turns without losing the individual threads. I'll likely read the next one, and thankful it's not just left as a part two.
A debut science fiction novel about secrets, genocide, and revenge.
I enjoyed all three point of view characters. Jun is a hacker with a secret past on the run. Esek is selfish, violent, and literally terrible, and yet she manages to be a captivating character. Chono is good-hearted and looks like a rule-following institutionalist, but her conflicting loyalties to people overrule her lawful tendencies. Chono and Esek are tied together by their relationships with Six, a mysterious figure who used to be a student with Chono; Esek spurning Six in the opening scene creates a feud that escalates out of control. I enjoyed the worldbuilding, but as you can see from this description, the heart of this book was in the relationships.
A content warning especially for genocide here. A good bit of the plot revolves around the Jeveni people; they were mostly killed on a small moon and the …
A debut science fiction novel about secrets, genocide, and revenge.
I enjoyed all three point of view characters. Jun is a hacker with a secret past on the run. Esek is selfish, violent, and literally terrible, and yet she manages to be a captivating character. Chono is good-hearted and looks like a rule-following institutionalist, but her conflicting loyalties to people overrule her lawful tendencies. Chono and Esek are tied together by their relationships with Six, a mysterious figure who used to be a student with Chono; Esek spurning Six in the opening scene creates a feud that escalates out of control. I enjoyed the worldbuilding, but as you can see from this description, the heart of this book was in the relationships.
A content warning especially for genocide here. A good bit of the plot revolves around the Jeveni people; they were mostly killed on a small moon and the remaining few are now economically exploited and hated. Folks tut about the past while doing nothing about the present. Other content warnings for quite a bit of bloody violence on page, and mentions of rape and pedophilia.
(On the minor space gender front, this book also has characters wearing "gendermarks" which felt sort of like pronoun pins of the future. One character switches up their gendermark from scene to scene. There seems to be some non-binary [this is my word] options too. It reminded me a bit of the signifiers in Everina Maxwell's Winter's Orbit.)
The book was a bit slow to start. Jun is on the run from Chono and Esek, and for a good chunk of the book we see Chono and Esek repeatedly showing up just too late to find Jun. I wish the chase on their end did a little bit more narrative work.
I think my favorite part of the book is its use of flashbacks. The reader gets teased about the names of some events that we eventually get to see. Esek shows up with a mangled ear, and oh boy do we find out about that in a later flashback too. The novel takes a little bit to get going, but these reveals about the past mixing with action in the present make for some great twists and a satisfying conclusion.
Not a perfect debut novel, but a solid and intriguing space opera, full of cruel, coward and calculating characters, even though one important part felt deja vu (a powerful family controls the production of the substance that enables space travel...). All in all, it was an enjoyable read.
Some may have seen it coming, but I did not. Thoroughly satisfying. Bloody and violent, but elegant. Sexy and sapphic. Swashbuckling duels and interstellar battles. Genocide, its coverup, its exposure.
What else could you ask for in a scifi adventure? 10/10, can't wait for the sequel.
