2008 SF/romance, second in the Grimspace series. In the previous book,
Sirantha Jax was instrumental in bringing down the evil corporation
that ran everything. But nature abhors a power vacuum.
The main story is simple enough: Jax is persuaded to act as
ambassador to the alien world Ithiss-Tor, but the criminal syndicates
want to make sure she fails, and are holding her mother hostage. On
the way to that world, there's a run-in with the humanivorous Morguts,
another visit to the benighted world of Lachion, and goings-on with
said criminal syndicates.
And of course there's her relationship with Marsh, because this is
only book two of six, so the protagonists can't be allowed to be
happy. She pushes him away because she seems to be getting ill and
doesn't want to worry him; then he pushes her away because he's busy
fighting and killing (for good reasons, naturally) and doesn't want to
share that with her. It all feels a bit manufactured given how much in
love with each other they are at the start of the book and how much
they've been through already, but then I'm not a fan of the Big
Misunderstanding trope in romances either.
Jax is inconsistent with the character as presented in Grimspace in
a variety of ways: then she looked after children, now she's freaked
out by them; then she spent time in a small cave, now she's afraid of
the dark. She's whinier than in the first book, which I thought
unfortunate as she was already pretty inclined to take the world's
troubles on her shoulders and then sit around going "poor me" until
something happened. She's much more interesting when she's in
kick-arse mode, which fortunately takes up most of the latter half of
the book.
Pacing is a problem. Grimspace seemed to work on its own, and may
well have been intended originally as a stand-alone book. This
certainly wasn't: it gives you some help picking up who's who, but the
story most certainly isn't complete, being clearly just the first
chunk of a longer narrative, and I should choose neither to start nor
to end the series at this point. It doesn't help that there's yet
another interlude on the extremely tedious planet of Lachion.
Followed by Doubleblind, but I don't feel great enthusiasm for it.
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