#CBR10Bingo: Cannonballer Recommends (this was a CBR Book Exchange gift from Yesknopemaybe (my paperback copy), it has also been favourably reviewed by MathildeHoeg, ingres77, dAvid, badkittyuno, belphebe, emmalita, narfna and faintingviolet, among others)
Rosemary Harper is trying to escape her old life and doesn’t want anyone tracking her down. She pays a lot of money to get a new identity and gets a job on a run-down and patched up spaceship, where no one from her old life would ever think to look for her. Aboard the Wayfarer, with its eclectic, but mostly affectionate crew, she finds a sense of community and a found family she never knew she was missing.
What starts out as mostly routine space travel becomes a lot more dramatic when the crew get an amazing, yet dangerous, job opportunity. Hired to make a wormhole tunnel to a distant planet, currently involved in a vicious civil war, could make the crew a huge amount of money. They have to survive to spend their earnings, though.
Science fiction is a genre I really would like to enjoy, but which I keep struggling with. Every so often, a book or a series comes along that I genuinely enjoy, but so much of the time, the genre just leaves me cold, or maybe bored out of my mind. I also much prefer sci-fi on screen, on TV or film. I tried reading Leviathan Wakes, the first book in The Expanse series, and it just didn’t do anything for me. The TV series, on the other hand, I’m hugely enjoying (to the point where I am now furious, because the husband and I are halfway through season 2, and they suddenly yanked it from Norwegian Netflix – how am I going to get the rest of it now?) and it brings the characters and story alive for me in a way the book just didn’t.
When I first heard about this book, there was only the one book in the series. There are now three, and in the time since I got the first book on sale, a whole bunch of people whose opinions I trust and respect have reviewed it in glowing terms. Frankly, a book that seems to appeal to so many different people just has to be good, right? So it was an obvious choice for my “Cannonballer Recommends” square (especially since I’ve been trying to cull my ever expanding TBR list a bit while planning the reads). Nevertheless, I was worried that I was going to be a lone voice who didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
Happily, this book worked for me and I enjoyed it a lot. Full review on my blog.