When all your main characters are whiny and spoiled and unlikeable, making your multiple villains as awful and vile as possible for comparison does not make your protagonists look any better. “Look how EEEEEEVIL the pirate captain is! He kicks puppies and drowns kittens and doesn’t call his mother on Mother’s Day!!!!” “Yes, Robin, I see, but that doesn’t make Althea any more fun to read about.”
The Vestrits are a wealthy trader family from Bingtown, and the proud owners of a rare and expensive liveship. Liveships are made out of wizardwood, and are sentient, able to help their captains find the best currents and wind and other sailingy things. (I kept thinking of Rincewind and the Luggage, but the ships are mostly much calmer than Pratchett’s version of wood with a personality.) Althea sails with her father, thinking she’s a fine sailor, but really mostly a spoiled angry brat. When her father dies and her foul brother-in-law inherits the liveship Vivacia, Althea storms off with only the clothes on her back, vowing to make her own way as a sailor. The misogynistic and vile brother-in-law decides his oldest son, the 14-year-old Wintrow, must learn to be a sailor. Wintrow would rather be studying for the priesthood. Althea’s unhappy, Wintrow’s unhappy, the ship is unhappy, the Vestrit family is swiftly running out of money, and Wintrow’s little sister needs to die a lingering and painful death.
I’m already tired of talking about these people, and I haven’t even gotten to the pirates yet. There’s a lot going on in this book, and all of it’s bad. It’s bleak and grim and even more horrible things keep happening to people. Plus, I am SO SICK of fantasy novels with societies where women aren’t supposed to think/work/govern/breathe. And yet it ends on enough of a cliffhanger that I already started book two. I want the proper horrible things to happen to the villains, and I want SOMEthing good to happen to the “good” guys. If that doesn’t happen, I may have to go on a Luggage-style rampage.
Read instead: China Mieville’s The Scar (pirates!) or Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang.
