Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Aside from some very amusing and possibly very *accurate* rants about this book, namely that the dialogue is sometimes *crappy*, the sciencey-bits are rather *weak*, and the fact that the made up words are pretty damn *generic*, most of the tale is *still* better than sooooooo much of the adventure space-opera out there.

Is it YA? Good question. Probably. But it's middle teens at the very worst. Expect pretty cool violence throughout, a single-minded protagonist girl, and a basic premise where this same girl vows revenge against space pirate and goes to amazing lengths and harsh changes to get her revenge...

It's still a straight adventure tale. There's cool things to figure out, such as different kinds of strange alien worlds that hold loot to the right captain with the right Bone-callers at the right time, making fortunes or breaking your neck in the process, and of course, PIRATES.

It's not a light tale. We're given a lot of build-up for Fura before everything goes to hell, so don't expect anything more than straight light adventure until then... and then go ahead and expect darkness the rest of the time.

I personally liked the basic story and the twists and turns. I can ignore the other complaints as perhaps the author attempting to keep the tale relatable to a younger crowd, but I also think it was a miscalculation, too.

Depth of feeling and being likable trumps easy terms. :) Fura was kinda lacking on that, plus I'm not quite sure I liked the explanations why this girl keeps switching between erudite and low-class in her speech. It wasn't quite natural. *shrug*

Other than that, the rest of the novel felt like part of the Revelation Space universe to a degree, including weird time-like portals, aliens that infest our bodies and change the way we see and think, robots, and some really, really cool tech which *IS* the purpose of these Treasure Island bits, after all.

It's a grab bag of goodies. Either you can get through all the things that bug you or you can't. There *IS* a solid story in here, however, and its conclusion was quite cool.

Just ignore the apparent intelligence of everyone other than the MC and you'll do fine. :)



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