meeplemaiden

It's taken me a while to get in to this book but over the last couple of days I've made a real effort to stick with it and it has paid off (I'm going through another phase of picking up books and putting them down again about half-way through). I can't say it has that wow factor that Neal Stephenson's Seveneves or Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time had for me but I'm enjoying it nonetheless. My favourite character so far has to be the sentient spaceship 'Trouble Dog'. She is a war ship at heart and although she is flying around the galaxy on peaceful missions she is only really happy when she can embrace her true nature and having both canine and human DNA that nature is fierce and loyal. It's good to see a strong female representation in the main roles, both good and bad, although I'm not really a fan of being pc for pcs sake. Generally I think you can tell when an author is trying too hard and in those cases I would much rather the author stuck to genders they can write about convincingly. Happily, in this case, I feel the author has made the characters convincing. So far there hasn't been a wealth of new ideas but I'm liking it enough have ordered the second book in the series. I hope the ending doesn't let me down.