Rating: WARTY!
I really liked this novel when I started it. It was fresh and things were happening, and the main character, Skeen, was not only older than your usual character in this sort of novel (sci-fi/fantasy) which made a refreshing change, she was strong, capable, fun, interesting, and engaging. That lasted for the first third of the book! The next sixth dropped precipitously into the doldrums and began to trudge tiredly, and I eventually lost all interest in pursuing the story. I found myself skipping several parts that I found uninteresting, in particular the stories Skeen told, but I continued reading in the hope it would perk back up to its original quality. It didn't, and by the half-way point I decided I could find something better to do with my reading time.
I noticed an error or two, but not many, in the text, such as "Skeen sat in the saddle watching all this activity with interest and some impatient." That last word ought to have been 'impatience'. In another instance, I read, "And he didn't want to hear her fell him how it excited her." Clearly that should have been 'tell him', not 'fell him'! As a writer myself I recognize that errors like this are things a spelling/grammar checker might not catch and as such, are the bane of every writer's life! I can readily forgive a few of those if the novel is otherwise a worthy read.
In addition to this, there were some oddities, such as Skeen's use of a made-up cussing language. She persistently describes one character, Tibo, as "Tibo that baster." I originally assumed it was meant to be a euphemism for bastard and meant to be pronounced bass-tuh. Pronounced as base-tuh, it's a word that describes a person or thing that bastes - i.e. moistens meat as it roasts! Curiously, 'baste' also means "to sew with long, loose stitches"! Hmm! Maybe the author meant that instead? Unfortunately Jo Clayton died in 1998 so no one can ask her! If she hadn't used any made-up words, I would have taken it for the 'loose stitching' definition, but because there were other made-up words, it was impossible to know what she meant! That's worth keeping in mind if you're a writer.
In another instance I read, "...a mountain could fall on her and she'd not bother waking." This is less of an oddity than an interesting exercise in speculating how you would write it. It's obvious what the author means, and you can argue that if that's the case, she did the job just fine, but the way she expressed that idea felt wrong to me; clearly if a mountain fell on you, you'd be dead and not wake-able - except as in a funeral wake! I'm not sure if that's what she meant to say here. Again, it's worth thinking about as a writer. No phrase in unimportant. If it is, it probably shouldn't be in the novel! But again, things like this are not deal-breakers for my enjoyment of a novel. The writing was, however!
I did love the off-hand and playful chapter titles, such as this one: "A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY OF DULL TRAVEL. WE'LL SKIP ALL THAT AND GET RIGHT TO THE NEXT EXCITING BIT." The novel was full of such titles (and other sentences) like this, and it was one of the things which won me over and drew me into the story in the first place. Another item of interest was Skeen's trusty sleepy-dart pistol. That in itself isn't new - in another novel series for example (Mike Shepherd's Kris Longknife series) which I'm reviewing this year, those weapons are used frequently, but in Skeen's story, the idea is slightly different. The darts are not metallic, but made of ice which is coated with the narcotic agent. She never runs out of darts, we're told, because there's always water around, yet we're also never told how she coats them with narcotic since we never see her do this. Maybe it's all done inside the pistol and all she has to do is slap a cartridge of narcotic in there and load it with water and she's good to go.
On the TV show Mythbusters, which I admired very much, they once explored whether or not a lethal bullet could be made from ice and discovered it could not. The friction and heat of the discharge melted the ice or made it so fragile that it wouldn't travel any distance or impact with any penetrating force. There's a reason bullets are typically made from heavy metal like lead! In Skeen's case, she does not use bullets, but darts fired with compressed air, so the author even talked her way out of that, which was nice to read. On an aside topic, Mythbusters also showed how powerful water is at stopping a bullet. They fired bullets into a swimming pool which slowed them down so much that they were not lethal after only dozen or so feet. On another show on Netflix, called Street Genius, host Tim Shaw demonstrated how weak a Magnum pistol is when firing through water balloons. The water really took the power away from the "most powerful handgun in the world" big time.
But the problem with this story, as I said, was that it died before the half-way point and the author failed to resuscitate it. Skeen, who was a light-footed (as well as light fingered) solo operative became bogged down with people and stuck in a single location, from which the only move was to another single location (on board a ship), and the story became likewise bogged-down so badly it effectively ceased to move for me. Even so I was prepared to press on for a while to see if it would perk up, but then I was hit by a scene involving rough sex with Skeen and a traveling companion and it simply turned me right off, because what had been a strong, independent, and somewhat heroic figure was now rendered into a weak, dependent, and needy woman, and I lost all interest in reading about her. I can't recommend this based on the first fifty percent.
