I wish I could articulate why Bluebird didn’t quite work for me. I really wanted to like it, and it has a lot of elements I did enjoy. As a whole, though, it took me a long time to get through the book and left me feeling frustrated.
The blurb is great.
Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space!
Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.
That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.
Rig was a weapons designer for the Pyrite faction, until she realized a weapon she designed would be used to kill what’s left of her people. She escapes and spends a few years on the run trying to balance her ledger working against the factions and their eternal war. Her girlfriend, June, is a librarian on the homeworld of one of the other factions.
The Pyrites catch up to her and she learns they are threatening to kill her twin sister if she doesn’t turn over the weapon’s schematics. She wants to save her sister and keep the weapon out of the hands of the factions. Along the way she has picked up the mysterious and deadly Ginka. Together they put together a plan and a team.
I should have loved this book. There were moments of swashbuckling adventure, and I really enjoyed those. There are interstitials set in the past that I also enjoyed. But, something about the way the story was told, especially between the spots of adventure, made me feel so distant and removed from the story that I would forget what I was reading while I was reading it. I liked it well enough that I would try something else by the author, but this one didn’t work for me.
Content warning: violence, betrayal, and mutilation.
I received this as an advance reader copy from NetGalley and Angry Robot. My opinions are my own.
