Bone Silence

Reynolds fans will be sputtering at the title, since of course the Glitter Band of his own Revelation Space universe is also a good match for "The Congregation", the collection of stations orbiting the old sun that are the setting for all 3 Revenger novels.

This is the third of the series. It is probably readable as a standalone novel, but it would somewhat spoil the other two, as there is essentially one big story arc.

The book is first and foremost an adventure story about two middle-class sisters who run away to become space pirates. There is also musings about deep time and the flow / cycle of history that will be familiar to readers of Revelation Space.

Technologically the setting is a bit steampunkish, with most of the locomotion involving solar sails, and fairly primitive space vehicles. This is interspersed with a variety of artifacts from older/distant civilizations, and a few early-20th century electronics.

The characters are interesting for being ethically nuanced. Even the bankers turn out to be not completely evil, although mostly so. The main characters are engaging enough that at least this reader cared whether they lived or died.

The plot is a bit like a roller coaster in that some of the ups and downs you see coming, but there always tends to be one more reversal of fortune to keep you reading. I did stop once or twice to take a breather, so I guess the plotting succeeded as (the audiobook equivalent of) a page turner.

There is some space-opera style big reveals, but although those were interesting enough, I would not say they are the main reason to read this book.

The world building does seem mostly quite original and always well crafted. Towards the end of the book I did start to see more echos of Revelation space, but I think this could be seen as related to the "end of series big picture explanation" above.

Let's start with the obvious question: Is this YA?
The quote on the Wikipedia page for this book points to a review by the Starburst Magazine and this is the related paragraph:

Which raises the fair point - is this a Young Adult novel or not? I suppose my answer would be kind of, sort of, not sure really, but what it is - I hope - is a straightforward SF novel that also happens to be accessible, and perhaps accessible to somewhat younger readers, in the same way that I was able to approach books like NOVA and DUNE when I was in my mid-teens.

You won't find that part on the page of Starburst Magazine anymore. Probably because someone actually read those books and realised:

YES. It is a Young Adult novel.

And not only that. It's target audience seems to be not only young adults but those young adults which are struck by a short attention span and therefore tend to also forget easily.
To even put any of those books in the same sentence with DUNE is an insult to Frank Herbert.

I was stranded for weeks with the audiobook version of those books and it was a horrible experience. Not only have I been told that this would be a pretty adult version of YA, I expected good space opera because of the author.

What I got was a village sized bubble universe (reminding me of Sun of Suns several times) where adults seem to decay intellectually with time and therefore there is nothing strange about having a child as a captain of a pirate operation or even a squad of ships because those intellectually retarded adults not only need them to read bones but to manage everything around them.
Unfortunately this is just my explanation for something that is just a result of bad writing.

The one consistent trope of this book was: nothing matters.
Something that was important for pages once, will turn out not to be worth more than a sentence (if at all) next time. Seriously, how does nobody realise that those little girls pretending to be captains are THOSE little girls everybody is looking for? Despite the miserable attempts to justify that how many little girls run ships there and why is this not mentioned? All side characters are mere decoration. Used once will be thrown away afterwards while the two main characters are presented to us as some superfast learning children pretending to be adults.
Everything else is inconsistent and carelessly written junk with no pay off that would be worth the trip.

It starts with the small things like the choice of names and vocabulary.
It's not only the ridiculous "ghostly stuff" word choice that reminds one of the current president of the USA but also the assumption that people who remember what a horse is won't remember the 3-letter word "air" and therefore choose to use "lung stuff" instead.
Hearing the name "Fura" being read like the usual Americans way to read Führer, made me cringe every single time. How can one be so careless?

Than there is the great idea:
Space Pirates in a far far future in a strange universe with many mysteries to be uncovered.
Sounds intriguing.
Sounds like it might be something.
But it's not.
There is nothing there. We merely get those things passed by us as a kind of teaser for a book that never came or maybe for some other author who'd pick that up and actually do something useful with it.

I've read better written fan fiction.

Now in the end I'm left with some questions:

- has this book been maybe written by Mr. Reynolds daughters (does he have any?)
- why would any author risk his reputation writing so bad or didn't he see that? Doesn't he have to care anymore?
- where are those good reviews and overall rating here coming from and will I ever trust reviews on this page again?

In the end it was a waste of time and I doubt I'll touch any new material by Mr. Reynolds anytime soon.