Heavenbreaker
The Heavenbreaker series, Book 1
Sara Wolf
Red Tower Books
Fiction, YA Romance/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: The day Synali murdered her father was the day she meant to die. All her life, she lived in squalor with her mother in the Low Wards of the space station humanity has called home for over four centuries while Lord Hauteclare and his legitimate offspring lived in idle luxury on the upper decks... until the man, bidding for a spot closer to the Nova-King, decided to eliminate any potential blemishes on his publicly spotless reputation via an assassin. Killing Lord Hauteclare nearly destroyed Synali, and now that the deed is done she only wants to do one last thing: humiliate the man's House so publicly the Nova-King will have no choice but to dissolve it and send its members away in disgrace forevermore. To that end, she means to steal his steed and ride in the coming tourney. Steeds - massive mecha suits patterned off the machines that once saved humanity from the aliens who destroyed Old Earth and scattered the surviving stations across the galaxy - are the playthings of the noble Houses, their zero-gravity jousting matches among the few sports approved by the church, and the source of much of a House's fortune and prestige. If a lowborn bastard daughter was found piloting a steed, even if she was found dead in the saddle... well, Hauteclare would never survive the scandal.
She didn't expect to survive, albeit barely.
When she awakens, a stranger makes her an offer: he will train her to ride a steed for real, to enter in the coming championship tourneys. For every match she wins, he will eliminate one of the nobles who helped bring the assassin to her mother's doorstep. Each death will bring House Hauteclare closer and closer to permanent dissolution. At the end, he even promises Synali what she most wants, a clean death so she can join her mother in the afterlife. With literally nothing left to lose, Synali readily agrees. But there's a lot more to piloting a steed than anyone outside the Houses understands, and a lot more to her new sponsor/partner than she knows. Worse, now that she's irrevocably committed to her own death, she unexpectedly and painfully finally finds reasons to want to live - such as her future rival in the tourney, a noble who represents everything she hates about his class, but whom she can't get out of her mind.
REVIEW: It sounded like a decent space adventure with a little romantic sizzle, and it started out with great promise, as Synali - a young woman who has clawed her way up from nothing, breaking her mind and spirit and body to get to this moment of perfect vengeance - is standing over the body of her uncle and preparing for what she expects to be her last moments in this life. This, I thought, is the sort of main character I want to follow through a book.
I wish I knew where she went, because she disappeared long before the halfway point, replaced with someone else who had her name and her backstory but was too wrapped up in pain and angst and forbidden lust and all-around stubborn refusal to notice what was right in front of her face to live up to the promise from those first pages.
The world she inhabits starts out on shaky ground - the exiled remnants of humanity have found themselves in orbit around a gas giant, and are slowly trying (and failing) to terraform it (though I'm not sure how that would work on a gas giant, unless humanity meant to live suspended in the atmosphere), while reverting to a weird mishmash of dystopian high-tech and pseudo-historical lifestyles... including what are basically literally castles on a space station - and only gets less plausible as I lost interest in the main character and started poking at the edges and tugging threads. The author also seems prone to repeating passages and emotional beats and descriptors ad nauseam (if I ever read about eyes the color of redwood and platinum hair again, someone will experience pain), and the tourney matches are all far too long, especially when it's a foregone conclusion that Synali will suffer greatly and unimaginably in the first one or two passes before miraculously pulling a victory out of the steed Heavenbreaker's thrusters (if I ever read another "dramatic" countdown again... more pain will happen). The plot starts to resemble a patchwork quilt of random ideas and notions snatched from other franchises that don't always fit together: a cup of Metropolis, a dash of Dune, a generous pour of The Hunger Games... even Watership Down gets lifted and slapped into a future so far removed from Earth that it's unclear if rabbits even survive on the station, let alone novels about them (though the culture and vocabulary and symbolism are chock full of references that seem very anachronistic in a setting where Earth is far more myth than concrete cultural memory). There's also a heavy Christian church presence for little reason except perhaps to explain why a highly advanced civilization like this one presumes to be has completely abandoned anything like birth control, even among the nobles to whom bastard children are still considered the ultimate stain. Then again, attitudes toward gender and sex, despite some nods to women as steed riders and scientists, seem very much rooted in the past (or maybe that's the reason for the church presence, to explain why women are still considered the sinners entirely to blame for men's apparently uncontrollable urges and even violence toward them). Even the one woman rider most firm in her belief in old knightly ideas of honor, above and beyond personal emotions and entanglements, inexplicably degenerates into a cliche fit of petty jealousy once she's in an engagement that even she admits is all about household obligation and not at all about emotion... at least, not until she realizes that her intended spouse has feelings for the wrong woman.
Anyway, amid all this mismatched mishmash of too-familiar snap-together parts and a setting that seems far more about aesthetics and mood than anything like plausibility or even internal consistency (much like the characters themselves), everything winds up being drawn out way too long as everyone wallows in extreme emotions and manufactured angst and turmoil (and yet another long countdown and arena match between giant mechs and attempts at witty banter by color commentators), building up to a climax... and no resolution. Yes, after all that, after slogging it through to the end hoping against hope for an ending that pulls it all together and delivers some sort of payoff, the story ends on a cliffhanger. But a cliffhanger only works if I care whether anyone actually is rescued before they lose their grip and plummet to their doom. By then, I could not have cared less. Despite the early promise and some potential in the story here and there, I just got sick of everyone and everything long before then.
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