The Good Luck Girls
The Good Luck Girls series, Book 1
Charlotte Nicole Davis
Tor Teen
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Western
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: When the Empire that conquered Arketta fell, it was supposed to be the dawn of a new era of equality and opportunity. Instead, it was more of the same oppression and prejudice, especially for the dustbloods: descendants of criminals and indentured servants sent by the empire to subdue the native cultures and tame the new land, only to end up little more than property to the fairblood aristocracy and, more recently, the fairblood landowners. Dustbloods are told to be grateful for the meager opportunities to repay their debts - after all, everyone knows it's just their nature to be lazy criminals, and fairbloods are doing them a favor teaching them the value of hard work. The only way out is to strike it rich - essentially impossible for a dustblood - or escape Arketta's borders - almost as impossible. But that doesn't stop the desperate from trying...
Aster and Clementine were sold by their dustblood parents when they were young. Agents for the "welcome houses" promised the girls would have shelter and fine clothes and food every night, in exchange for providing certain services to paying customers. As with most fairblood promises, it's a lie; the "good luck" girls are marked with indelible "favor" tattoos of cursed ink that burn white-hot if concealed, sent to the doctor for cutting to prevent pregnancy, and worked mercilessly as servants until their sixteenth birthday when they start their real work in the private rooms... work helped by addictive sweet thistle that keeps them docile and eventually rots their minds away. Aster "graduated" a year ago, and will do anything to keep her sister from becoming another plaything for the brags, the clients who frequent the welcome houses and have been known to kill girls as casually as drowning kittens... but there's nothing she can do, not when their lack of shadows mark them as dustbloods and their favors forever mark them as runaways. But Clementine's first night with a brag ends in murder - self defense, as the man was choking her to death, but the fairblood law won't see it that way. Now, the girls have no choice but to flee, following a slender thread of hope found in old tales of "Lady Ghost", who is said to be able to strip away favor marks and help good luck girls find freedom. With three companions - Clementine's friends Tansy and Mallow and the unlikely ally Violet, a rare fairblood good luck girl - Aster and Clementine make a desperate bid for freedom... but the law isn't the only danger awaiting them, in a rough country where wild beasts and vengeful spirits are as deadly as any lawman's bullet.
REVIEW: Once again, I wanted to like this book. It starts with a decent, if dark, premise and world, adding a strong Western frontier spice with a twist of ghostly menace. The girls have distinctive personalities, and if they aren't always deep, they do end up cohesing into an okay ensemble for the adventure. There's also a fair bit of action, so the tale doesn't drag too often (even if it does sometimes repeat itself). But at some point, little issues start accumulating into big irritants. The dustblood/fairblood dynamic is clearly meant as a stand-in for cultural and racial prejudices that see some people utterly dehumanized (while the dominant culture/race demands gratitude for not treating them even worse), but for some reason I started feeling like it was being a little too obvious about the substitution, the hammered-home disparities between dustbloods and fairbloods turning them both into something approaching caricatures rather than characters. Likewise, most every man in the book (with one notable exception) is a misogynistic creep/borderline (or actual) rapist who cannot understand why the heroines don't simply accept and appreciate their single role in Arkettan society. This, too, soon ventures past a harrowing portrayal of how women are treated in a misogynistic society and becomes almost cartoonish in its extremity and repetition (not at all helped by how the narrator of this audiobook spoke the male lines with a sleazy, slinky, almost cackling drawl). There's also a noted habit of every character in the book to pick terrible, terrible times and places for long, heartfelt conversations... and a habit of the author repeating failures to drive home just how terrible the situation is, how horribly the girls are being treated, how hopeless and cruel and infuriatingly unfair the society they live in is, and so forth.
The parts that ultimately sank it below a flat Okay rating, though, come toward the climax, when the torture and objectification is drug out far, far too long, banging the same plot notes again and again and yet again like a sledgehammer dropped on a keyboard, to make subsequent events remotely plausible; I'm avoiding details because of spoilers, but at some point it completely killed my lingering suspension of disbelief stone-cold dead, leaving me to trail along behind the story to the conclusion without the slightest bit of concern or engagement in what was happening to whom. Killing my suspension of disbelief - one the main driving factors behind why I read in the first place - is one of the major sins in my list of reading commandments.
While there are some nice and interesting elements here, and several places where the story does come together to work decently, I just could not get past that sin, which taints everything that came before.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Walk the Earth a Stranger (Rae Carson) - My Review
The Misadventures of Maude March (Audrey Couloumbis) - My Review
Six-Gun Snow White (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
Deal with the Devil (Kit Rocha)
Deal with the Devil
The Mercenary Librarians series, Book 1
Kit Rocha
Tor
Fiction, Action/Romance/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: After the solar flares that devastated global civilization, nations crumbled into hardscrabble remnants of themselves. Too many city and state governments found themselves at the mercy of the TechCorps, elite private organizations who rule with iron fists and artificially enhanced soldiers. For the average citizen, life is cruel and hard and continues only at the whim of forces beyond their control... but some few manage to slip the leashes of their masters and go underground, quietly working against the TechCorps and the criminal networks that spread to fill the power vacuum across America.
Nina was once one of three clone siblings, trained as a unit for special ops, until one disastrous mission left her the last one standing. Faking her death, she fled to a nondescript neighborhood in Atlanta, where she and two friends work to create something like stability and hope and community. Together, they help the people by distributing books and media beyond the strictly controlled (and profit-driven) official TechCorps outlets, providing shelter and medicine, even helping locals preserve food from their meager farms and gardens (most of which are illegal for not using patented TechCorps crops and seeds). When Nina gets word that a stash from the Rogue Library of Congress - a group of renegade librarians who, during the collapse of the old world, defied orders and compiled everything they could in hidden and sealed vaults for future generations - she knows it could mark a real turning point, the chance to bring so much lost knowledge back to the people and maybe break the chains binding the world. She also knows that it may well be too good to be true, but she cannot resist the hope... or the handsome messenger.
Knox was captain of the Silver Devils, a unit of artificially enhanced Protectorate soldiers crafted and mercilessly trained to enforce TechCorps rule, until his masters pushed too hard and stole too much. Now he and his men are on the run - but they can't run forever. They'll die in a matter of weeks if they can't figure out how to disable the killswitch in their enhancements, a built-in failsafe against disobedience. His team found a promising lead in a rogue specialist, but she was kidnapped, and the abductors demand a ransom: the capture and return of Nina. What at first seemed like a simple, if cold-blooded, equation - a stranger exchanged for a friend and the future of his men - soon becomes far too complicated. Knox has never met anyone like Nina before, never felt anything like she makes him feel. Can he really betray this woman and her friends? Does he even have a choice?
REVIEW: This book makes its promises pretty early on and up front, offering a dystopian post-apocalyptic world as backdrop for a decently steamy romance, with a healthy dose of action and angst and banter among side characters. Nina, Knox, and most of the characters in the book have suitably traumatic backstories that render them physically superior but emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of True Love, thrust into a plot that ensures betrayal and heartbreak and second-guessing of one's own heart (and a few opportunities for sex even while they wrestle with their inner angst over whether they're even capable of love). They have distinctive personalities and mesh well together, even when they have personality clashes. It also contains a decent level of actual action, not just the promise of action; these are all mercenaries in a post-apocalyptic world, and their travels are suitably and inherently dangerous. (Some stories set up "dangerous" worlds and neglect the actual dangerous part.) So, on those levels, the story more or less works.
The "less" parts, unfortunately, really started to bug me.
More than once, the characters - all ostensibly tactically trained - stumble into traps so obvious they might as well have been red X's under cartoon boxes propped on sticks. (Seriously, when I - someone about as tactically aware as a clod of dirt - spot a trap before the military "expert" characters, something's wrong.) There were also far, far too many times where someone was on the verge of saying something exceptionally important, only for another character to barge in right as they were opening their mouth and stop the conversation before it starts. A few times, yes, understandable, but it just kept happening. I especially got irked how the same characters would've had ample time to talk if they hadn't wasted so much time before opening their mouth wrestling with the same angst-riddled Issues they'd already wrestled with before. Another trick that started out interesting but soon felt like so much wasted time was the author's insistence on interlude notes and memos from the outfits that created Nina, Knox, and the other characters, which didn't ultimately add much that the story itself didn't tell me and just became clutter. Add in a few twists that felt rather cliche and stale and an ending that, given the high level of action and violence preceding it, felt weirdly flat and rushed (followed by an eyeroll-worthy "twist" setting up a conflict for the next installment), and I wound up feeling distinctly unengaged.
There are many parts here that work well, and should've elevated it to a Good rating, but it just starts feeling too stretched and over the top.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (Jackson Ford) - My Review
Three Mages and a Margarita (Annette Marie) - My Review
Bitter Seeds (Ian Tregillis) - My Review
The Mercenary Librarians series, Book 1
Kit Rocha
Tor
Fiction, Action/Romance/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: After the solar flares that devastated global civilization, nations crumbled into hardscrabble remnants of themselves. Too many city and state governments found themselves at the mercy of the TechCorps, elite private organizations who rule with iron fists and artificially enhanced soldiers. For the average citizen, life is cruel and hard and continues only at the whim of forces beyond their control... but some few manage to slip the leashes of their masters and go underground, quietly working against the TechCorps and the criminal networks that spread to fill the power vacuum across America.
Nina was once one of three clone siblings, trained as a unit for special ops, until one disastrous mission left her the last one standing. Faking her death, she fled to a nondescript neighborhood in Atlanta, where she and two friends work to create something like stability and hope and community. Together, they help the people by distributing books and media beyond the strictly controlled (and profit-driven) official TechCorps outlets, providing shelter and medicine, even helping locals preserve food from their meager farms and gardens (most of which are illegal for not using patented TechCorps crops and seeds). When Nina gets word that a stash from the Rogue Library of Congress - a group of renegade librarians who, during the collapse of the old world, defied orders and compiled everything they could in hidden and sealed vaults for future generations - she knows it could mark a real turning point, the chance to bring so much lost knowledge back to the people and maybe break the chains binding the world. She also knows that it may well be too good to be true, but she cannot resist the hope... or the handsome messenger.
Knox was captain of the Silver Devils, a unit of artificially enhanced Protectorate soldiers crafted and mercilessly trained to enforce TechCorps rule, until his masters pushed too hard and stole too much. Now he and his men are on the run - but they can't run forever. They'll die in a matter of weeks if they can't figure out how to disable the killswitch in their enhancements, a built-in failsafe against disobedience. His team found a promising lead in a rogue specialist, but she was kidnapped, and the abductors demand a ransom: the capture and return of Nina. What at first seemed like a simple, if cold-blooded, equation - a stranger exchanged for a friend and the future of his men - soon becomes far too complicated. Knox has never met anyone like Nina before, never felt anything like she makes him feel. Can he really betray this woman and her friends? Does he even have a choice?
REVIEW: This book makes its promises pretty early on and up front, offering a dystopian post-apocalyptic world as backdrop for a decently steamy romance, with a healthy dose of action and angst and banter among side characters. Nina, Knox, and most of the characters in the book have suitably traumatic backstories that render them physically superior but emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of True Love, thrust into a plot that ensures betrayal and heartbreak and second-guessing of one's own heart (and a few opportunities for sex even while they wrestle with their inner angst over whether they're even capable of love). They have distinctive personalities and mesh well together, even when they have personality clashes. It also contains a decent level of actual action, not just the promise of action; these are all mercenaries in a post-apocalyptic world, and their travels are suitably and inherently dangerous. (Some stories set up "dangerous" worlds and neglect the actual dangerous part.) So, on those levels, the story more or less works.
The "less" parts, unfortunately, really started to bug me.
More than once, the characters - all ostensibly tactically trained - stumble into traps so obvious they might as well have been red X's under cartoon boxes propped on sticks. (Seriously, when I - someone about as tactically aware as a clod of dirt - spot a trap before the military "expert" characters, something's wrong.) There were also far, far too many times where someone was on the verge of saying something exceptionally important, only for another character to barge in right as they were opening their mouth and stop the conversation before it starts. A few times, yes, understandable, but it just kept happening. I especially got irked how the same characters would've had ample time to talk if they hadn't wasted so much time before opening their mouth wrestling with the same angst-riddled Issues they'd already wrestled with before. Another trick that started out interesting but soon felt like so much wasted time was the author's insistence on interlude notes and memos from the outfits that created Nina, Knox, and the other characters, which didn't ultimately add much that the story itself didn't tell me and just became clutter. Add in a few twists that felt rather cliche and stale and an ending that, given the high level of action and violence preceding it, felt weirdly flat and rushed (followed by an eyeroll-worthy "twist" setting up a conflict for the next installment), and I wound up feeling distinctly unengaged.
There are many parts here that work well, and should've elevated it to a Good rating, but it just starts feeling too stretched and over the top.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (Jackson Ford) - My Review
Three Mages and a Margarita (Annette Marie) - My Review
Bitter Seeds (Ian Tregillis) - My Review
Saturday, July 31, 2021
July Site Update
July's seven reviews are now archived and cross-linked at the main Brightdreamer Books website.
Enjoy!
Friday, July 23, 2021
California Bones (Greg van Eekhout)
California Bones
The Daniel Blackland series, Book 1
Greg van Eekhout
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Daniel wasn't yet six years old when his father Sebastian, one of the strongest mages in the kingdom of Southern California, first made him eat a kraken spine, setting him on the path to become an an osteomancer - a wizard who can tap into the power of bones, teeth, and fossils - like Sebastian himself. But already the Hierarch ruler's grip was growing tighter, with no room for potential traitors or threats to his reign. Years later, Daniel himself would witness his father pay the ultimate price for ambition, when the Hierarch's soldiers capture Sebastian and the Hierarch literally devours him to absorb his magic. Ever since, Daniel has been living like a ghost in the city of Los Angeles, making a meager living off petty thefts and cons with a small yet loyal crew. He never wanted to go up against the Hierarch again - until his thief mentor, Otis, tells him they have a shot at cracking the Ossuary, the greatest storehouse of bone magic in the entire kingdom. It's a score no thief can resist, especially when Otis reveals that Sebastian's sword, an osteomantic artifact of untold power, is reportedly kept there... the sword young Daniel failed to save when the Hierarch raided his father's home all those years ago. Despite the dangers, Daniel accepts the job - and finds himself in far more trouble than he could possibly have imagined.
REVIEW: The concept is interesting, with an alternate world where osteomancers and other mages are real and the power dynamics of the world are altered accordingly. The wealth of the La Brea tar pits enabled the Heirarch and his elite council of mages to have the power to break away from both America and Northern California... but, as in our own world, non-renewable resources have been overused and depleted, with osteomancers resorting to literal cannibalism to absorb scraps of power from other mages. Unfortunately, van Eekhout seems a little too in love with his alternate-Los Angeles concept, particularly resurrecting key figures from the city's colorful past and casting them in supporting roles, such as Walt Disney, the aging glorymage, who uses magic to essentially brainwash the populace into artificial happiness and docility so they tolerate the increasingly dystopian conditions of their kingdom, and William Mulholland, the man responsible for the city's original water infrastructure, here recast as a water mage granted unnatural lifespan and powers. I started feeling like the author was standing next to me, nudging me with his shoulder and pointing, to make sure I appreciated just how clever his very, very detailed vision of a canal-riddled, magic-permeated Los Angeles was. It didn't particularly help that I didn't like several of the characters, particularly Daniel Blackland, who seems to think he's clever but has several instances of glaring stupidity and whose wisecracks must've been more humorous or appropriate in his head. The Hierarch himself is more phantom than threat for most of the tale, dancing at the edge of awareness until finally stepping onto stage for the final act, but in a way that makes him less of an omnipresent threat and more of a bogeyman or cardboard prop. The story moves okay, but bogs down now and again (particularly when Daniel blunders, then tries and fails to wisecrack his way out of trouble), and the final bits drag out too long. Women characters, what few there were, also felt strangely marginalized; this is very much a story of fathers and sons and boys and men, where women and mothers tend to be disposable side-pieces, to the point I was distinctly irked. So, while it wasn't what I would call terrible, and while I did enjoy the concept of osteomancy and certain parts of the central heist structure and alternate world, by the end I realized I wasn't really enjoying it like I'd hoped to, and doubt I'll pursue this series further.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Black God's Drums (P. Djeli Clark) - My Review
Fire and Heist (Sarah Beth Durst) - My Review
The Waking Fire (Anthony Ryan) - My Review
The Daniel Blackland series, Book 1
Greg van Eekhout
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Daniel wasn't yet six years old when his father Sebastian, one of the strongest mages in the kingdom of Southern California, first made him eat a kraken spine, setting him on the path to become an an osteomancer - a wizard who can tap into the power of bones, teeth, and fossils - like Sebastian himself. But already the Hierarch ruler's grip was growing tighter, with no room for potential traitors or threats to his reign. Years later, Daniel himself would witness his father pay the ultimate price for ambition, when the Hierarch's soldiers capture Sebastian and the Hierarch literally devours him to absorb his magic. Ever since, Daniel has been living like a ghost in the city of Los Angeles, making a meager living off petty thefts and cons with a small yet loyal crew. He never wanted to go up against the Hierarch again - until his thief mentor, Otis, tells him they have a shot at cracking the Ossuary, the greatest storehouse of bone magic in the entire kingdom. It's a score no thief can resist, especially when Otis reveals that Sebastian's sword, an osteomantic artifact of untold power, is reportedly kept there... the sword young Daniel failed to save when the Hierarch raided his father's home all those years ago. Despite the dangers, Daniel accepts the job - and finds himself in far more trouble than he could possibly have imagined.
REVIEW: The concept is interesting, with an alternate world where osteomancers and other mages are real and the power dynamics of the world are altered accordingly. The wealth of the La Brea tar pits enabled the Heirarch and his elite council of mages to have the power to break away from both America and Northern California... but, as in our own world, non-renewable resources have been overused and depleted, with osteomancers resorting to literal cannibalism to absorb scraps of power from other mages. Unfortunately, van Eekhout seems a little too in love with his alternate-Los Angeles concept, particularly resurrecting key figures from the city's colorful past and casting them in supporting roles, such as Walt Disney, the aging glorymage, who uses magic to essentially brainwash the populace into artificial happiness and docility so they tolerate the increasingly dystopian conditions of their kingdom, and William Mulholland, the man responsible for the city's original water infrastructure, here recast as a water mage granted unnatural lifespan and powers. I started feeling like the author was standing next to me, nudging me with his shoulder and pointing, to make sure I appreciated just how clever his very, very detailed vision of a canal-riddled, magic-permeated Los Angeles was. It didn't particularly help that I didn't like several of the characters, particularly Daniel Blackland, who seems to think he's clever but has several instances of glaring stupidity and whose wisecracks must've been more humorous or appropriate in his head. The Hierarch himself is more phantom than threat for most of the tale, dancing at the edge of awareness until finally stepping onto stage for the final act, but in a way that makes him less of an omnipresent threat and more of a bogeyman or cardboard prop. The story moves okay, but bogs down now and again (particularly when Daniel blunders, then tries and fails to wisecrack his way out of trouble), and the final bits drag out too long. Women characters, what few there were, also felt strangely marginalized; this is very much a story of fathers and sons and boys and men, where women and mothers tend to be disposable side-pieces, to the point I was distinctly irked. So, while it wasn't what I would call terrible, and while I did enjoy the concept of osteomancy and certain parts of the central heist structure and alternate world, by the end I realized I wasn't really enjoying it like I'd hoped to, and doubt I'll pursue this series further.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Black God's Drums (P. Djeli Clark) - My Review
Fire and Heist (Sarah Beth Durst) - My Review
The Waking Fire (Anthony Ryan) - My Review
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Driving the Deep (Suzanne Palmer)
Driving the Deep
The Finder Chronicles, Book 2
Suzanne Palmer
DAW
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Fergus Ferguson has a knack for finding stolen things - and finding trouble - wherever he goes across the galaxy, but there's one item he's been avoiding for far too long: the motorcycle he stole at age 15 when he ran away from his home in Scotland and fled to the stars. He keeps meaning to return it to his cousin and make amends, but can't seem to get up the courage to face the place that left him so heartbroken. Now, having more or less recovered from the almost-deadly excitement on the distant deep-space habitation of Cernee, he realizes he can't put it off anymore. He says goodbye to his friends, the eccentric Shipbuilders of Pluto, and makes the trek sunward to Earth and a dusty storage unit... only to find that the motorcycle is long gone, replaced by crates containing stolen art. The next thing he finds is a retired New York City police detective accusing him of the theft and associated murders - just when Fergus gets word that the Pluto shipyard has been attacked. With the detective as a determined yet distrustful stowaway, Fergus heads back to space, and plunges into a plot that takes him deep beneath the ice of Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus, where he might find his missing friends from the shipyard... if he doesn't find a grisly, watery grave first.
REVIEW: Like the first installment of Fergus Ferguson's adventures, Driving the Deep hearkens back to old-school space adventures, if with reasonably hard science behind it. It follows through on some themes from that book, too, as Fergus has come to realize that the galaxy just isn't big enough to keep running away from his painful past, not to mention dealing with the fallout of his peculiar alien encounter and its aftereffects. It brings back the AI (or rather SI - "simulated intelligence") ship Venetia's Sword, whose theft kicked off the previous adventure. The pursuit of the Pluto attackers to Enceladus holds a personal horror for Fergus; his father committed suicide by drowning right in front of the boy, a big part of why he ran away from home, so finding himself immersed beneath countless kilometers of crushing water is hardly a pleasant experience. Palmer creates an interesting and horror-tinged world beneath the moon's icy crust, one where the pressure of the deep alone is enough to drive many to madness even without dark conspiracies and killers and secret plots piling on the stress. As before, he finds allies and enemies in unexpected places, with an abundance of luck both good and ill, and after a fair bit of chaos and close calls, most everything wraps up by the last pages (save a few stray threads for the third installment to pick up on). Things slow down a bit while the technical challenges and culture of Enceladus are explained, but overall it's as fast-paced and adventurous as the previous volume, and just as well recommended.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Velocity Weapon (Megan E. O'Keefe) - My Review
Finder (Suzanne Palmer) - My Review
The Abyss (Special Edition) by 20th Century Fox by James Cameron - 1989 movie DVD (Amazon link)
The Finder Chronicles, Book 2
Suzanne Palmer
DAW
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Fergus Ferguson has a knack for finding stolen things - and finding trouble - wherever he goes across the galaxy, but there's one item he's been avoiding for far too long: the motorcycle he stole at age 15 when he ran away from his home in Scotland and fled to the stars. He keeps meaning to return it to his cousin and make amends, but can't seem to get up the courage to face the place that left him so heartbroken. Now, having more or less recovered from the almost-deadly excitement on the distant deep-space habitation of Cernee, he realizes he can't put it off anymore. He says goodbye to his friends, the eccentric Shipbuilders of Pluto, and makes the trek sunward to Earth and a dusty storage unit... only to find that the motorcycle is long gone, replaced by crates containing stolen art. The next thing he finds is a retired New York City police detective accusing him of the theft and associated murders - just when Fergus gets word that the Pluto shipyard has been attacked. With the detective as a determined yet distrustful stowaway, Fergus heads back to space, and plunges into a plot that takes him deep beneath the ice of Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus, where he might find his missing friends from the shipyard... if he doesn't find a grisly, watery grave first.
REVIEW: Like the first installment of Fergus Ferguson's adventures, Driving the Deep hearkens back to old-school space adventures, if with reasonably hard science behind it. It follows through on some themes from that book, too, as Fergus has come to realize that the galaxy just isn't big enough to keep running away from his painful past, not to mention dealing with the fallout of his peculiar alien encounter and its aftereffects. It brings back the AI (or rather SI - "simulated intelligence") ship Venetia's Sword, whose theft kicked off the previous adventure. The pursuit of the Pluto attackers to Enceladus holds a personal horror for Fergus; his father committed suicide by drowning right in front of the boy, a big part of why he ran away from home, so finding himself immersed beneath countless kilometers of crushing water is hardly a pleasant experience. Palmer creates an interesting and horror-tinged world beneath the moon's icy crust, one where the pressure of the deep alone is enough to drive many to madness even without dark conspiracies and killers and secret plots piling on the stress. As before, he finds allies and enemies in unexpected places, with an abundance of luck both good and ill, and after a fair bit of chaos and close calls, most everything wraps up by the last pages (save a few stray threads for the third installment to pick up on). Things slow down a bit while the technical challenges and culture of Enceladus are explained, but overall it's as fast-paced and adventurous as the previous volume, and just as well recommended.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Velocity Weapon (Megan E. O'Keefe) - My Review
Finder (Suzanne Palmer) - My Review
The Abyss (Special Edition) by 20th Century Fox by James Cameron - 1989 movie DVD (Amazon link)
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