Book review: Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon
I can't tell you how nice it is to read a Moon book again. TiD was published way back in 2004 so I should've read it long ago but that was the period when I had to stop reading books altogether because I was getting zero sleep at night -- there were so many good books out around then and I have no reading discipline. Naturally once I put off reading it I could never find it again, so I've been picking up the other books in the series but unable to read them until I found this one again. *sighs* You'd think dementia was kicking in but I've always been like this.
I've been cataloguing my books in LibraryThing and ran across both Marque and Reprisal and Engaging the Enemy this past week. Can't remember if I got around to buying Command Decision yet, but I think so. Seeing them reminded me that I've never read TiD and I've recently gotten back into reading again so I went scrounging through my bookshelves for it. I found it right around 4:00 a.m. I should have told myself 'Great! I'll start it tomorrow when I have more time!' but of course I didn't. Five and a half hours later I finally closed it, went to the bathroom (I'd been crossing my legs for a couple of hours), and crawled to bed.
Kylara Vatta is a romantic at heart, not a lovey-dovey insipid little lady but an adventurer who is willing to work hard and face danger and possible death to fight for what's right. That's why she turned her back on working for the family business, an interstellar transport company, and signed up for the academy instead. Unfortunately, she could not control her urges to champion the weak and helpless and when a fellow student maliciously takes advantage of her known quixotic tendencies she is kicked out of the academy just months from graduating near the top of her class.
While nobody at home scolds her for what happened, she chafes under their assumption that she was too soft-hearted to be a military officer. In order to get her away from the media circus, she is made the captain of an old tub of a transport with a crotchety drive and ordered to take the ship to the scrapyard and return. By then her actions would be old news.
Upon arriving at Belinta, a small agricultural colony, she discovers that a rival corporation had reneged on their contract to deliver a shipment of agricultural machinery from Sabine that is desperately needed on Belinta. She decides to take a chance and delay her trip to the scrapyard to take on this contract herself, even though she will have to buy the machinery on spec.
This seems eminently safe and doable -- until the drive picks the next jump to degrade badly enough that they are reluctant to test it with another jump; until Sabine turns out to be in the midst of an insystem crisis; until an unknown party chooses that time to destroy the ansibles, the communication lifelines between star systems. Rebuffed by the Sabines, injured by merc soldiers, forced to watch friends and crewmembers die, Ky learns what she is made of but also must decide where her adventurer's heart and mind belong.
I like Ky. She's not perfect, but it's a believable imperfection and she is likable enough that you forgive her errors. Moon takes the time to show Ky at her greenest which you don't usually see -- heroes and heroines tend to have all the green scrubbed out of them by the time they are introduced to the reader. This is also the period when Ky is at her numbest from the scandal so the two aspects together slow down the first third of the novel a bit, but I think it's worth it in order to see the difference when Ky wakes up at Belinta, looks around, and realizes there is life out there, and danger, and adventure, and profit.
I've been cataloguing my books in LibraryThing and ran across both Marque and Reprisal and Engaging the Enemy this past week. Can't remember if I got around to buying Command Decision yet, but I think so. Seeing them reminded me that I've never read TiD and I've recently gotten back into reading again so I went scrounging through my bookshelves for it. I found it right around 4:00 a.m. I should have told myself 'Great! I'll start it tomorrow when I have more time!' but of course I didn't. Five and a half hours later I finally closed it, went to the bathroom (I'd been crossing my legs for a couple of hours), and crawled to bed.
Kylara Vatta is a romantic at heart, not a lovey-dovey insipid little lady but an adventurer who is willing to work hard and face danger and possible death to fight for what's right. That's why she turned her back on working for the family business, an interstellar transport company, and signed up for the academy instead. Unfortunately, she could not control her urges to champion the weak and helpless and when a fellow student maliciously takes advantage of her known quixotic tendencies she is kicked out of the academy just months from graduating near the top of her class.
While nobody at home scolds her for what happened, she chafes under their assumption that she was too soft-hearted to be a military officer. In order to get her away from the media circus, she is made the captain of an old tub of a transport with a crotchety drive and ordered to take the ship to the scrapyard and return. By then her actions would be old news.
Upon arriving at Belinta, a small agricultural colony, she discovers that a rival corporation had reneged on their contract to deliver a shipment of agricultural machinery from Sabine that is desperately needed on Belinta. She decides to take a chance and delay her trip to the scrapyard to take on this contract herself, even though she will have to buy the machinery on spec.
This seems eminently safe and doable -- until the drive picks the next jump to degrade badly enough that they are reluctant to test it with another jump; until Sabine turns out to be in the midst of an insystem crisis; until an unknown party chooses that time to destroy the ansibles, the communication lifelines between star systems. Rebuffed by the Sabines, injured by merc soldiers, forced to watch friends and crewmembers die, Ky learns what she is made of but also must decide where her adventurer's heart and mind belong.
I like Ky. She's not perfect, but it's a believable imperfection and she is likable enough that you forgive her errors. Moon takes the time to show Ky at her greenest which you don't usually see -- heroes and heroines tend to have all the green scrubbed out of them by the time they are introduced to the reader. This is also the period when Ky is at her numbest from the scandal so the two aspects together slow down the first third of the novel a bit, but I think it's worth it in order to see the difference when Ky wakes up at Belinta, looks around, and realizes there is life out there, and danger, and adventure, and profit.