First of a projected trilogy. I learned about it from a half-chapter
free sample in the back of Ancillary Justice.
Devi has just resigned from the Blackbirds, a powered-armour
mercenary unit operated by her homeworld of Paradox. She's good at
armour, and she wants to avoid the desk jobs she'll be promoted into
and instead join the élite Devastators, the unit that guards and
fights for the sacred king. But that's not going to be easy even with
her great record: the best route open to her seems to be to sign on
with a merchant spacer who gets through an awful lot of security
troopers even though he doesn't seem to be going anywhere desperately
dangerous.
This book throws one in at the deep end. All that, and some basics
about the various aliens who inhabit this set of worlds, is thrown out
as casual background information in the first chapter. I very much
admire Bach's approach to getting across information that's old hat to
the characters, but of course new to the reader. There's also an
assumption of genre knowledge: we're expected to know, for example,
roughly what powered armour is without needing it explained in depth.
For an experienced reader of science fiction none of this will be any
problem, but someone new to the genre might experience some
difficulty.
Bach describes the book in her afterword/interview as an
"action-packed space romance", and I think that's fair. There's an
obvious and thoroughly flagged romance trope early on, and they don't
stop there, though they're not as predictable as some -- Linnea
Sinclair, I'm looking at you and Finders Keepers. If you dislike
books with kissing in them, this is probably one to avoid. (It's not
as shy of action as, say, Bujold's Vorkosigan series has become, but
action is only one of the things this book is about, and if you were
only interested in that you'd be disappointed.)
Apart from the action and romance, there are strange psychic powers,
alien superweapons, and at least two conspiracies. I'm enjoying the
way all this has been wound together; I hope it can be unwound as
satisfactorily in later volumes, which I certainly plan to read. My
main concern is that Devi may end up being a bit of a Mary Sue, too
good at everything.
The finale is more of a pause for breath than an ending; this is not a
point where the story would reasonably stop.
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