RogerBW's Blog

2007 YA SF, first in a series. Ishmael Horatio Wang finds himself orphaned and penniless, and the only way of getting out of that seems to be to sign aboard an interstellar merchant ship.

So yeah, it's basically Two Years Before the Space Mast. And this volume at least is mostly about showing us how the world works, when the ship is well-run and everyone's one big happy family. There's very little threat or opposition here, everyone's friendly (or at worst "gruff with a heart of gold"), and nobody's a bully or a petty tyrant.

So on the one hand one of the most crucial plot questions is whether to rent or buy trestle tables (well, space trestle tables) when setting up in a port's bazaar, and on another hand the characters are lampblack-shallow, but on the third hand it's still fun. There aren't any great tensions of worldview between ship people and planet people, or dynastic marriages to be made, or space pirates; there's just hard and dirty work that needs to be done well, and at least down at this level in the hierarchy that's really all that matters.

Do things happen in later books? I don't know. I'll give at least one more a try, though.