Newly commissioned brainship, Nancia is excited for her first mission. However, her first group of passengers, all High Family scions like herself, don’t seem to realize that she’s brainship, and when Nancia doesn’t inform them of the fact, she overhears a number of things that trouble her. Five years later, those conversations come to haunt her as Nancia is pulled into an investigation that links to those same passengers.
I liked this one more than the Ship Who Sang. It’s more of a coming of age story, and the juxtaposition of inexperienced brainship with experienced brawn worked really well. I really appreciated Nancia’s character growth throughout the book and felt that it was handled well. I found her first brawn, Caleb, annoying from the beginning, though that might have been intentional on the authors’ part. This one definitely had better developed characters and a plot that runs through the entire book. There were a lot of morally grey characters in this one, and that worked pretty well. I also really enjoyed the expansion of the worldbuilding. This is set quite a few years after Helva’s story, and I liked seeing both how things had developed as well as new points of view about the setting.
However, there are a few things that were frustrating. There are far too many pov characters, and a number of them don’t really add much to the story. Some of them were great, but a number of them left me feeling like what was the point unless we got more from them than we did. In fact, overall, it felt like there was more to the story that could have been fleshed out. Still it was a fun outing, and I think it did a lot to develop the world. Three out of five stars.
