I really should have DNF’ed this, but I guess I’m too damn stubborn. Plus, books often get much better towards the end. To spoil my review, this one did not. At all. In fact, the ending managed to make the entire miserable book even worse. I’m almost impressed at that. 

The writing really wasn’t for me. The author wrote so woodenly that I couldn’t connect to anything or any character. Despite all the suffering that happened in this society because we readers are kept at arms length from all of the characters I literally didn’t care. Not one main character had an emotion. In fact, the only characters I liked at all were a couple of very minor characters that stuck around for a page or two at max. 

Well, them and one other. The surgeon, Theo, was the only character that I liked better the more I got to know him (her? the author puts in a careful scene where Theo explicitly tells a character he isn’t a man, and that character then keeps calling Theo ‘him’?).

The plot could actually have been interesting. The sci fi elements of the ship were cool, and I wish it had been explored properly. The ending was so utterly bizarre and disjointed that not even my last hope (the world building) meant anything. 

There were so many things that could have worked. In the end, even the injustices suffered by the main characters was so minimised by those characters that the book ended up making the opposite point that I think the author was trying to make. 

Just avoid it.