Uni High Reads

I loved ‘All the Birds in the Sky’ and ‘The City in the Middle of the Night’, and was overjoyed to see that Charlie Jane Anders was taking her first stab at YA. I was even more excited to be able to get it as an ARC (Advance Reader’s Copy)! I read this book back in October, but scheduled it to publish today, April 13, when the book is coming out.

A quick plot synopsis: Tina has known since she was thirteen that she had a higher calling– literally. Some day, someone would be coming from the stars to whisk her away to resume her post as one of the most celebrated heroes of the Royal Fleet. See, Tina is a clone of the fallen Captain Argentian, who gave her life to save her crew. When the Fleet comes calling, Tina/Argentian is their greatest hope in their fight against the insidious Compassion, but Tina struggles with this expectation. With Tina and a ragtag band of other Earthlings along for the ride, the crew of HMSS Indomitable strike out across the stars to find the means to stop the Compassion’s scourge.

This is a fast-moving sci-fi adventure with a fun cast of teen protagonists from all over the world. Although the book is a little bit jumpy, hopping from incident to incident, there’s very little downtime, and the whole last hundred pages is one long hype-train roller coaster. I love some good space combat scenes! I also loved a lot of the questions the book posed about things like humanoid bias and the interactions of cultures. It’s definitely not hard sci-fi, but encompasses enough plausible specifics to explore interesting questions. Oh, and if you’ve played Mass Effect I think you’ll see some inspiration in this book.

From a queer/social justice perspective, this book has a lot to offer. First, the normalization of pronouns other than he/she was great, especially the default inclusion of pronouns in introductions. One great moment was someone says what her pronouns are before declaring the protagonists are her prisoners. Amazing. Homophobia doesn’t exist in the Royal Fleet, and why should it?  I love when authors are willing to leave behind problems that exist in our society and envision a better one– while homophobia can be a source of realistic conflict, there are enough other problems in space!

While there are some minor bumpy parts in the book, largely caused by the amount of exposition that gets packed in, it was a still an awesome read that I devoured in a single day– and I’m even more excited for the rest of the series, whenever it might be coming out! Also, if you read this and like it, the author’s other books are amazing, especially All The Birds in the Sky.