WELCOME ABOARD THE CAPRICIOUS!
I really liked the idea of the book, but I didn’t really vibe with the execution. To be honest, I find it a bit hard to put a finger on what it was that made me start actively lose interest around the middle despite the stakes rising and the pace quickening and the characters being the kind I usually find fun to follow. Perhaps it was actually the pacing, and if so, then it’s likely “it’s not the book, it’s me“ issue. But also perhaps it was just how the books kept presenting me with promising stuff and then glossing over the aspects I liked the most.
I also kind of felt that while the characters all had really interesting deals and backstories, the way those were handled was kind of shallow. At first, I strongly expected Boots to become my favorite. A badass older woman, a war vet who struggled to find a place for herself after a big war and made some questionable choices, her entire conflict with Cordell over the different choices they made for the same reason? It was all so promising. But while during the rare downtimes the author did try to delve into all that, I feel like plenty of really cool opportunities were discarded in favor of space action and spaceship crawling. Honestly, the character I felt I connected to the most was Nilah whose arc was constructed out of some far simpler building blocks: a star athlete living a carefully constructed, training-focused, media-friendly life finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy she doesn’t understand, ends up captive on a spaceship run by a crew of misfits, and discovers the world is so much bigger and more complex than she’s known. In a way, it’s like every coming of age story ever, but I feel like the book digs into it deep enough and Nilah’s experience come up fresh and vivid enough on the page that it still feels exiciting and somewhat novel. Yes, I’ve read about sheltered young people thrown smackdab into the middle of things bigger than them before, but I’ve never read about Nilah. Meanwhile with the characters who are advertised as complex and multilayered from the beginning ended up falling flat as too little was done with all that potential. Just goes to show how much execution can make or break ideas!
The worldbuilding left me with the same feeling: interesting on the surface, but it lacked substance. I actually really enjoyed the early chapters where I was just thrown into this sci-fantasy universe with no explanation. It was all tech magic, forgeries, racing, spaceship, scavenging in space, the aftermath of a war, class differences, conspiracies, and I was eagerly waiting for it all to come together and start making sense. But while I did feel more confident a few chapters in, I felt like too many things were handwaved rather than explained, and as a result the world never felt fully solid.
The plot is probably the best aspect of the book, with lots of excitement and rising stakes, part heist, part dungeon crawl but make it spaceships instead of underground caverns. There were some distinct Firefly vibes, which I appreciated as a fan of the show. Reading big parts of it felt like watching an action movie. Funny thing: I think I would have enjoyed it more if the author made the world more generic and picked characters with simpler deals to go through all the same events.
