Book Review: Saltation by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

[technomom]

Originally published at Enemy of Entropy. You can comment here or there.


Salta­tion (Theo Wait­ley, #2) by Sharon Lee

My rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars

Salta­tion (Theo Wait­ley, #2) is good enough that I fin­ished Fledg­ling (Theo Wait­ley, #1), then read it in one sit­ting. It sim­ply has the sort of momen­tum that doesn’t allow for good stop­ping points - some­thing that is true of many of the Liaden Uni­verse novels.

At the end of Fledg­ling, Theo was spon­sored into pilot school by Scout Cho sig’Radia. Salta­tion begins with her time there, just as polit­i­cally naïve as ever, but a much more con­fi­dent per­son than she was at the begin­ning of Fledg­ling. Many of the char­ac­ters from Fledg­ling reap­pear, includ­ing Win Ton, Kamele, and Jen Sar. There are new char­ac­ters too, though, such as Kara ven’Arith and Orn Ald yos’Senchul (who, by the way, also appear in a free story, Landed Alien, that has just been released at the Baen web site and should be read after Saltation).

Theo is a legal adult now, but a very young one, and she has plenty of grow­ing up left to do. That said, this is a young ADULT novel, not a children’s book - while it isn’t dis­cussed specif­i­cally, Theo does take a lover.

She con­tin­ues to flex and stretch into an admirable hero­ine. She isn’t per­fect, by any means, being some­times short-​​tempered and not under­stand­ing social cues eas­ily. She’s some­one read­ers can relate to, though, and that is impor­tant. We were brought up con­cur­rent with the end of I Dare, which was vastly sat­is­fy­ing. I will go right on with read­ing Ghost Ship, because I def­i­nitely want to know more!

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