If I'd known this book had the word 'chronicles' associated with it, I would never had considered reading it, but the interesting cover illustration distracted me and the plot sounded engaging, so I missed that somehow, and launched into it, getting to about two-turds the way through it before I fully realized it was going nowhere - precisely because it's a series. Book one is a prolog and I don't do prologs because they're boring and don't tell you shit. I wish I had back the time I wasted on this one. The book description is completely misleading.
The concept is ridiculous to begin with - steampunk in space? The spaceship has boilers which is the stupidest thing I ever heard. I even put up with that in hopes I would get a good story. More fool me. Having loved the character of Kaylee in Firefly, I was primed for the character of Alice - a mechanic. In fact this whole story is a Firefly rip-off in many ways. Violet is the captain of a pirate vessel which operates on the run from coalition vessels, raiding them and distributing food to rebel bases and selling-off what they can to make some money.
On one such raid, they kidnap Alice to get her to fix the ship's boilers(!) intending to release her later, but eventually she ends up - as we knew she would - on the ship as a crew member, and so starts the relationship with Violet. This is the dumbest relationship ever, with them getting it on and getting off and it falling off so metronomically that it became tedious to read it. They were like 13 year olds, and to pretend non-violent Violet was a pirate captain was stupid.
The story wasn't god-awful, except when I read of one character Violet met:
"Hiya. I'm Jhanvi," she said with a thick southern drawl
This is on an alien planet, and she has "a thick southern drawl"?! Ridiculous!
Of course everyone on the crew is the best there is. Alice is the best mechanic; Hyun is the best doctor; Kady is the best engineer; Violet the best captain. Barf. They should have named the spacecaft the Mary Sue. I reached a point, not quickly enough unfortuantely, where I could not stand to read any more of this, and I ditched it. Can't commend it.
