Grimspace was a surprise for me in many ways. One, I expected it to be gritty, but pleasantly, it was not. Two, I never expected heroism. Three, after the heroism, I never expected selfishness. The novel certainly took me in places I had no idea I would go.
To recap, Jax is a navigator through grimspace, one of a very few with the elusive "j-gene" that allows one to navigate grimspace. She is an emotional wreck following an accident where she lost her pilot, who was also her lover and her dearest friend. She currently on a space station and is going through dream therapy, which appears to be doing more harm than good. She cannot leave her room without an escort.
When March appears in her room, offering a way out, she takes it. They escape from the station and go to an off-the-beaten-path planet, where Jax learns that March hopes to help establish an independent school for grimspace navigators--one unafilliated with the sinister and powerful Corp. Their plan involves something that I thought was unethical. Jax had her doubts as well, but she knows that the Corp is doing other things that are just as unethical if not more so, so she goes along.
Then the plot started taking turns that I never expected. In the interests of not giving too much away, I'll just throw up some highlights. We have an alien baby, a pirate space station, ghastly human experimentation, an all too easy escape, and an alien bounty hunter with a . . . but no, that would give too much away.
The plot tends to be episodic, jumping from objective to objective. It reads something like The Adventures of Jax. In some places you will love Jax, and in other places you might be thinking, "Why the HECK is she doing that?" Sometimes I thought the plot was a bit convienient for storytelling purposes. Their first escape was way too easy, and it would have been better if it had been a bit more desperate. The author seemed to think the escape was too easy as well, because she threw in a line about lax guards. Other plot turns seemed convenient as well, but I won't belabor the point. Jax and her friends faced plenty of challenges to make up for it.
Overall, I really enjoyed it. It had characters with consciences, emotional consequences for jumping in bed too early, heroism, both sung and unsung, betrayals, clever deceptions, people willing to die for their cause and the formation of unlikely friendships. I loved it that the ship doctor was the strong guy, and that the ship's mechanic was a woman with a past you would NEVER expect. I also didn't expect there to be an alien on the ship, nor did I suspect the alien's eventual relationship with Jax. I did like the way she resolved it, however. And I liked the way the novel ended. It resolved much more than I expected--the novel could stand alone except for a tiny teaser that is probably explored in future books.
I just looked at the blurb from Wanderlust, the next book in the series. I wondered where the author could possibly take the series from here, but it looks just as good as Grimspace.
Fans of science fiction romance, this is one you need to read.
Monday, November 24, 2008
GRIMSPACE by Ann Aguirre - Final Review
Monday, November 17, 2008
Loving Grimspace!
I'm enjoying Grimspace so much that I'm going to spend another evening reading it. I'm a little over halfway through and it has taken some very unexpected turns. Let's just say that you would never expect some of the things to happen. I certainly didn't see them coming.
It was suffering from a lack of a villain until about halfway through. The villain was the amorphous "Corp," a bureaucracy that Jax worked for, navigating through Grimspace. Now, there's another one, but he's the best kind of villain--the kind you actually like.
There's lots of unexpected humor in the story when an alien baby appears on the scene.
Belatedly I notice his eyes aren't on mine, and I glance down. Shit, I'm standing around bare-breasted, nursing like some class-P village woman, my scars shiny with slime. Rest of me is covered in dried mud, and my hair looks like it belongs to a New Terran dirt-dauber priestess, so yeah, I've never looked better. But frag him, what do I care? I'm doing a good thing here.Yes, this book has soul. It has bona-fide heroism packaged in a scarred-up gruff exterior (kind of like the way I enjoyed The Sword-Edged Blonde, only with a female main character), and I'm eating it up. So if you don't mind, I'll go read some more.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Grimspace - Opening Chapters
I've read eleven chapters of Grimspace by Ann Aguirre so far, and it looks like it will be a quick read. It didn't engage me at first, but with each chapter I got more and more into it until at this point, I'm committed.
Sirantha Jax is in trouble. She's wrecked her last spaceship and her pilot-partner is dead. She is deeply affected by his death, and the psychological counseling she is undergoing just seems to be making things worse. She is held in gentle imprisonment until it can be determined if she was at fault.
Or at least, she thinks it's gentle. When March breaks into her cell and gives her the choice to go with him or stay, he tells her that the counseling was intended to drive her insane, not help her. It makes sense to her, so off with him she goes. They bust out of the space station, encountering perhaps just a few plot stretches to make their escape easier.
Sometimes the problem with starting a book off with a bank and plunging right into the action is you don't have much of a reason to care for the character at first. You're just scrambling to catch up. For that reason, I didn't get to a point where I didn't want to put the book down until about fifty pages into it. Not that it was difficult to get into--not at all--but I also found it rather easy to set aside until this point. I also encountered a death that was rather convenient for Jax, but I won't go into detail for fear of spoilage.
However, things improve when Jax takes action to save a life that no one else seems inclined to save. Heroism will always work for me. So I'll keep reading.
Here is my original showcase on Grimspace, with all the usual links.
