Review: What a journey!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 30, 2012
Let me say first and foremost, this was an excellent character driven book. They are vivid and endearing, I actually found myself missing one of them, Ruth, after she left the story for her own kind of happy ending. I wish she had stayed. However, she is not the only character I feel in love with. The main character Cale truly does go through a story of redemption.He starts out in the life he wants to escape from and the author shows us how bad a life it was and how truly far Cale (although at the beginning of the book that is not his name) had fallen. It was done in such a way that even someone as squeamish as I fully understood how bad it was and clearly understood the depth Cale had sunk to without getting graphic about it.Pirates here are not the Captain Jack Sparrow lovable kind. No romanticism here. They are horrible, they are vicious, and they are the terror of the universe at this time.Cale escapes this life to start a new one, and runs into a wonderful cast of characters along the way. From Tess the ship's -sentient- AI (with no-one realizing this at first) to naive Ruth (with a wonderful sense of adventure wishing to see the universe) to Dee, the eventual love interest and Zant filling out what would become the regular cast as they go about helping each other and ultimately a planet in the midst of invasion. A planet that Cale has very personal interest in, yet can't say why.Language gets bit salty for my taste at times, but never long, more out of the blue as if it was possibly part of an earlier draft that got left in since there is plenty of 'cursing', save with Dee, Tess and Ruth, but of the made up kind like BattleStar Galactica or Farscape.Great characters, great story, beyond the sudden saltiness, I only regret its ending and that Ruth hadn't stuck around, she was the rare type of character who wasn't prepared for every situation yet intended to try to help anyway. I think that and her sense of adventure is what drew me to her. Ruth was clearly over her head, but she wouldn't back down because of that.Cale, Dee and Zant were very capable characters, they are the expected kinds, yet the author doesn't make Dee the typical 'scifi-supergirl' who could do everything to prove she's better than a man. She has her limits and she's adjusting to the life Cale has thrust her in quite by accident.Tess was just 'miss helpful' in sometimes humorous ways. Cale's suspicions were wonderful to read, humorous at times, as the author lead us up to his discovering that Tess wasn't what he thought she was. Ruth's and Dee's acceptance of Tess because they didn't know Tess wasn't suppose to be sentient made a delightful contrast to Cale's (at first) constant worries about the ship-AI he had pirated in his old life.I could go on and on, a great cast of characters, even the ones that only have a chapter or so appearance come across as unique, yet plausible in this setting.A wonderful read, I hope you'll find it so as well.