Grimspace

Entertaining at times, perplexing at others.

At the start of the story, Sirantha Jax is "recovering" from a crash that killed her pilot and every other person aboard ship. She is a jumper, meaning that she has a special gene that allows her to navigate grimspace, essentially a faster than FTL method of navigating large distances in space. Being a jumper requires being metaphysically linked with a pilot, which usually results in a romantic connection as well. Jax is reeling from the loss of her pilot and the trauma of the crash, while her employers are forcing psych visits on her that are meant to break her, so they can pin the whole thing on her. It takes a while for Jax to come to that realization though.

Before she breaks, she's rescued by a grim, gruff man named March. He convinces her to leave with him and together they make it back to his ship, where the rest of his crew waits for her. They literally cannot leave without her, because their previous pilot and jumper are both dead, having died in the effort to retrieve Jax. She immediately takes the guilt of their deaths on herself and forces herself to jump with March as her new pilot, which feels like a betrayal to her previous pilot Kai.

From this escape, they pretty much jump from disaster to disaster, all the while Jax is taking every little bit of guilt she can gather from every interaction. This is around the time where I start to get pretty frustrated by Jax. She's literally making no decisions for herself; she is a passive crewmate that allows everyone else to make decisions for her and just goes with the flow. She asks zero questions about what her rescuers intentions are. Eventually we get a few answer, but Jax's passivity is incredibly frustrating, especially since she's our narrator for the entire story. It's all just happening around her.

In addition, she starts to take on a familiarity with the rest of the crew that is really difficult to believe, given that she's know them for all of a day or so? The timeline is pretty blurry, especially in the beginning. She starts to make comments about the other characters, like how "March is never not mean to her" which is a pretty big generalization when he really hasn't been mean to her at all and if anything, she's been pretty mean to him; not to mention that, again, she's been with him for about a day or two and that whole time they've been constantly running from things. She makes these sorts of generalizing comments about all of the characters, with very little basis to them.

The only relationship that feels remotely well-paced is the one between Jax and Dina. They start out pretty openly disliking each other, but the way their relationship evolves over time feels much more realistic than the rest of Jax's insta-connections, and I found myself really enjoying a lot of the banter between them.

The first time I really start to like Jax, and actually connect with her character, is when she says enough is enough and leaves the crew. She finally makes a decision for herself and actually voices an opinion of her own, and stands her ground! Granted it's 70% of the way through the book at this point, but it was nice to see her with some actual backbone. Obviously she eventually has to go back, and Doc makes sure that she does go back. But it's easier to accept her relationship with March when she does go back, because she's had time to process her trauma and her conflicting feelings about him after the loss of Kai.

The ending gets wrapped up pretty quickly after this. The foreshadowing from all the times where March warned Jax about his dark past is fulfilled when he decides to take a bunch of hostages and threaten to blow up an entire city when he thinks Jax is dead. Luckily Jax shows up just in time to talk him off the ledge, while her brand new bounty hunter friend releases recordings of Jax's innocence and the Corps' evil plans to the public, resulting in riots and rebellion across the galaxy.

Sure, sure sure sure.

In the end, I think this story wanted to be big and epic with some dark, scary, bad-ass characters. But it tried to do that without doing a lot of the work to make it believable. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief long enough to feel the things I think the author wanted me to feel. There were moments that I genuinely enjoyed, and I'm hoping that maybe the next books will improve on the story-telling enough to let me fully enjoy the story!