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.