Seafire (Natalie C. Parker)

Seafire
The Seafire trilogy, Book 1
Natalie C. Parker
Razorbill
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: When she was fourteen years old, Caledonia Styx lost her family, most of her friends, and their rebel ship, the Ghost... and it was all her fault. She was ashore gathering food when she encountered a Bullet, one of the soldiers of the dreaded Aric Athair, scars aglow with the addictive Silt that compels their obedience - and, through his lies, she betrayed everyone and earned a knife to the gut. Left behind, Caledonia and her friend Pisces could only watch as their lives and hopes went up in flames.
Four years later, Caledonia commands the rebuilt Mors Navis with Pisces and a crew of over fifty women and girls, all victims of Aric's brutal reign, all of whom have sworn vengeance. They have one ironclad rule: no Bullets on board. But when a strike on a barge goes awry, Pisces brings back a wounded Bullet who saved her life. Caledonia's gut demands his death in the deep - but then he tells her that he's seen her brother, whom she thought lost with the Ghost. Can she trust a word he says? Can a Bullet ever be redeemed? And can she ever live down her own shame at her one moment of weakness, four long and bloody years ago?

REVIEW: Seafire wants to be a story of a determined young woman seeking revenge against a cruel oppressor. It wants Caledonia Styx and her crew to be strong and defiant and resourceful in the face of seemingly-impossible odds, underdogs fighting for justice in a world seemingly devoid of it. It wants to... but it keeps tripping itself up by forcing itself to be a boys-versus-girls story that can't seem to shake the stigma of the word "girl." One character, about two-thirds through the book, even calls out the use of "girl" as a means to demean women... yet the author started this on the first page and persisted through the entire story, always calling the crew girls, even the most mature of them. (Do I even want to get into the iffy symbolism and connotations of their sworn enemies, the Bullets, being sea men? Was this a deliberate extra layer on the gender war theme, or an unfortunate coincidence?) At every turn, it feels like the story is shoving its characters' genders in the reader's face, emphasizing how they defy traditional gender roles to the point that it flattens the tale and weakens the characters. Someone just can't be a good engineer or a brave fighter; they're a good girl engineer and a brave girl fighter. Romances are implied between crewmembers, again in ways that reduce them from rounded people to objects (not helped by an emphasis on appearances that borders on creepy at times.) When Pisces brings the Bullet defector aboard and demands he be given a chance, Caledonia can't believe the betrayal - a schism that comes across less like a difference of opinion and more like the schoolyard shock when one girl starts liking boys while her friend still thinks they have icky boy-germs. And, of course, it's a given that he'll challenge the relationship between the two (which is either sisterly or romantic; I got mixed vibes, as though the author couldn't quite commit to a romance here but couldn't quite not.) Meanwhile, Caledonia nurses her old shame in a way that makes it clear she's warped her entire life and command around being unable to accept having ever been attracted to a male, blaming that for everything that's gone wrong in her life. With the brutality of Aric and the multitude of cultures and realms encountered and the potential dynamics of the crew, that's not what the story needs to be about, but it's what the story is made to be about. Beyond that, there's a world that hovers somewhere between fantasy and science fiction (there's plenty of far-future technology, relics of a lost era, but the overall feel remains secondary world/fantasy and might be more likely to appeal to that audience, which is why I split the difference), with a decent amount of action and some decent battles, and even if some plot twists and character developments were blatantly telegraphed, it kept me turning pages. The ending, though, goes out of its way to not resolve an arc (because this is Book 1 in a trilogy), deliberately wasting the reader's time on a confrontation that goes nowhere and does nothing. This is what dropped Seafire just below the flat Okay rating, and is why I don't expect to read the second volume.

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