Essa Hansen

I read this book slowly because I wanted to make it last. It is another incredible work of storytelling. Caiden is an excellent character, even though there were definitely moments I wanted to shake him. I absolutely loved his found family, and mourned his losses with him. Seriously, the speed at which the author made me love some of these characters was astounding.

Essa does a brilliant job of drawing the reader into Caiden’s world and then rapidly expanding it as his understanding expands, so the reader gets to feel Caiden’s awe and disorientation (without it being overwhelming). The aliens are really alien and so cool, and yet at the core they’re just people, as it should be. Shades of grey are everywhere throughout this book, and Caiden wrestles with morality as much as he wrestles with his (justified) anger. Every secondary character felt fully realized and fleshed out, and they stepped right off the page with their own traumas and their own goals, and I loved them. Well, except one. He can still rot, even if he feels like a whole person. Even many of the tertiary, background characters felt fully realized, despite seeing them for a short time, and I love the way they add a layer of history to the crew.

The universe felt vast and the factions felt real, with good people crossing paths with Caiden along with really-not-nice-at-all people. But even the antagonists are fleshed out and multi-dimensional, with factions within factions (sometimes within factions!), and I loved the peeks into the wider politics of the universe. And what a universe it is—vast and multi-layered, with universe bubbles touching universe bubbles, each with varying physics and other conditions, and that was just so cool. The tech was super cool, too, and the gloss leads to some Spice-like economic-political shenanigans.

In addition to all this, Essa manages to wrestle big questions with thoughtfulness and I really appreciated that. Caiden’s quest for revenge and how much he risks for it, the questions of how responsible he is for things that happen that he can’t prevent, and the way he slowly learns to look beyond monsters to see if the heart of the monster is really a monster or not. Just masterfully done, I thought. A ton of action is packed into this book, yet it begins and ends rather slowly and thoughtfully, counter-pointing the gripping, hectic pace of some of the chapters in the middle.

So in short, if you enjoy sci-fi with alien aliens, multi-layered societies, three dimensional characters, emotional intensity, and questions of morality, you need to read this book.

And then we can all want our own pet nopheks together.

For those interested, the main character is ace-spectrum, and there's fantastic trans, nonbinary, and #OwnVoices neurodivergent representation in this book too. (En is the best supporting friend ever.)… (more)

I've been flirting with reading this novel for awhile (there is no denying that the cover art is a real "come on"), but I had reservations about whether this was going to rise above being a standard-issue "hero's journey" book. What eventually turned the tide was that the "group mind" of my reading circle basically threw a dart at the book pile, and Hansen's novel is what it hit.

So, does this novel rise above the average? To a degree. I think Hansen does write with some ambition, and keeps modern trends in space opera in mind (having Alastair Reynolds as a cheerleader doesn't hurt), and the opening chapters are very promising. The next question is does Hansen rise above both the classic and modern tropes, and I'm not so confident about that. At least I kept coming back to the sense that I've seen this sort of story done better recently, with Rebecca Kuang's "The Poppy War" being perhaps the best example of a downtrodden young protagonist on a mission to get even with the world; even if it means breaking the world to do it.

There is also the issue that Hansen's prose can be less-than-felicitous, too often oscillating between portentous and declamatory, with a strong dash of techno-babble. I suppose that this is what a decadent space empire should sound like (I blame Frank Herbert), but when the story should be flying it feels like one is clawing your way through a swimming pool of gelatin.

So the basic question I'm left with is whether Hansen showed me enough to make me want to read two more books. The provisional answer is actually yes. One, I do cut Hansen some slack for a first novel. Two, the short description of the rest of the trilogy suggests that Hansen is going to deal with the moral and ethical issues Caiden has left himself with in the course of his career of retribution. As always, your mileage may differ.… (more)