Review: A Bit Implausible, But Good Enough To Engage Readers
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 11, 2013
The Outcast is overall engaging, despite combining plot elements that seem implausible, and ending with a lesson in modern conservative economics. The fall of a vast stellar Empire to its own internal corruption is sketched both in the action of the characters and in excerpts from a period text in economics which could have been written by US partisans of the Tea Party. This is not to say the lessons are entirely wrong -- just (in my view) simplistic and unconvincing to those who depend upon programs such as US Social Security and Medicare in real life outside of fiction.The heroine Sameena is a sympathetic figure who keeps you interested until the end.  But she makes dangerous newbie mistakes as a space-faring trader, that one would have expected her adopted family and culture to have trained out of her.  Her Universe is a hostile place, in which she doesn't adequately sense human treachery in the making, despite many small clues.Having myself worked for a time in the Middle East, I found Sameena's portrayal of the profoundly misogynist and intolerant culture of Islam to be one of the more plausible elements of the book. Left unexplained was how such a culture could train technologically ignorant young men who can barely read their Koran, to even minimally operate a small fleet of warships.Those things being said, the book is an entertaining read despite its flaws. I'll give it four stars.