Normally I wouldn't rate a book with plot errors for the sake of action/ drama this high, but the characters are so engaging it got a bump up. Enough so that I'll try the next book. I just hope further in the series we get some better editing against stupid stuff like combat veterans on a spaceship going into a fight & just dropping their space armor helmets instead of putting them on. ( )

A competent series-starter, bringing together a battered bunch of characters with various murky pasts and mysterious objectives, getting them into pickles with an assortment of opponents, and putting them into a spaceship to make their way into the future. That's a lot for one book. Let's see where they go from here.
( )

So the Rebel Alliance topples the Old Empire. But unlike what happens in Star Wars, these rebels aren't cut out for governing. The Empire has collapsed – but there's nothing waiting to take its place. Now there's only anarchy, poverty, pirates, and old enemies.

Alisa was an officer in the rebel army. Now she's got no money and she's stranded on a dead-end world light years away from her daughter. She hatches a plan to steal her mother's old ship. One problem: an Empire officer's squatting in it. If she wants the ship, she's going to have to take him too.

This one was … okay. I've read and thoroughly enjoyed a couple of books in Buroker's Junkyard series. The characters in this one were nowhere near as compelling. And the heteronormative gender binary felt stale and disappointing.

It's a reasonably good story.

The war between the Imperials and the Alliance is over, with many dead on both sides.

Alisa, who was a pilot for the Alliance (who won) is trying to get back some to her daughter.

The only way home is to use her mother's old freighter, which is in poor condition sitting in an old scrapyard, and turns out to be occupied by an Imperial cyborg...

She needs to find enough passengers to cover the costs of getting home, but several of the passengers (including the cyborg) have their own agendas....

Has a flavour slightly reminiscent of Firefly - assorted crew, struggling to keep flying in the aftermath of war - but where it suffers is in the characterisation.

Some of the characters are reasonably well drawn, but some remain very cardboard. For instance, Beck, who is hired as security (and has his own combat armour) turns out to like grilling meat and to want to develop his own line of sauces. But given that promising start, he never talks about anything except the sauces (and even than in vague detail). No mention of side dishes, different grilling techniques, how he actually makes the sauces, etc.

They have no lives outside the plot.

I find myself comparing with "The Long Road to a Small Angry Planet" by Becky Chambers.

Chambers's characters have far more personality and life to them.

This isn't a bad book. I got the first three as a set and am already reading the second, but I think they'll probably be 'read once' books, whereas Chambers is definitely in the 're-read' category. ( )

It was a fun, fast read

As with most of the really good stories, the best part is the interactions between the characters; and this one had me chuckling through the whole time with just enough suspense to make me read it through in one sitting. Can't wait to start the next one. ( )