Hokay, I've sat on this review long enough. I finished the audiobook for this book yesterday, and I've been sitting here ever since trying to figure out how to rate this book. I feel like this is a book that you'll either find intriguing enough to want to continue, or you'll bounce off hard before you get started. This is a long review, so buckle in.
We meet the book's protagonist, Captain Kel Cheris, neck deep in keeping her troops alive capturing some point of interest for her command. The Kel as a whole (for “Kel” in Cheris' name indicates the society in which she was born, raised, and developed under) are very regimented, very militaristic, conditioned to react instantly to formation changes (orders, for lack of a better word) that were developed generations ago. Cheris herself is an incredible mathematician, something valued in this universe where math and mathematical calculations basically rules everything. Without getting too far into the weeds as to what calendrical society is, math governs the laws of nature, and the main struggle of this book is against a heretical order bent on pushing their own calendrical society and, essentially, rewriting the fabric of the universe as a result.
Still with me?
So Kel Cheris, by merit of being an incredibly good mathematician, gets an infamous strategist kept in cold storage (again, simplified) for hundreds of years implanted in her brain by Kel scientists and given a promotion allowing her to command several ships worth of people/servitors in order to combat this heresy. This infamous strategist is known for some evil things he did when he was alive, and they implanted him in Cheris' brain to augment her natural abilities with his. There's a bit of Cheris x Jedao tension there if you're looking for it, and Jedao himself shows some bisexual tendencies as well, which I thought was a nice touch.
This was a challenging book to read, not because of the topic necessarily, but the way things were integrated to carry the reader along. There's not a lot of hand-holding with respect to questions of “what does __ mean?”, and often I found myself shrugging my shoulders, assigning some arbitrary “x does y” meaning to it, and moving on. The ship names, the abilities, the station names, are very much “word salad”, in that aside from being pretty and poetic, mean very little. I'm kind of in love with the pictures words and names like “Fortress of Scattered Needles”, “Fortress of Spinshot Coins”, “invariant ice”, and ship names like “Unspoken Law” and “Sincere Greeting” conjured in my head while reading. I also recognize that this isn't everyone's cup of tea, and if you get hung up on what exactly some terminology means without explicit descriptions, you might have a bad time.
I struggled in the beginning until I basically just let the book happen, and then I enjoyed it immensely. This strikes me as one of those series where things make more sense the further in you get, and then if you go back and re-read, you'll get even more out of it. Really glad to have stuck with this, and I look forward to reading more in this series.
