Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Warning: there may be spoilers in this review.

I really enjoyed this one. It’s a modern space opera with a lot of big ideas, all filtered down through the eyes of the central protagonist, Haimey Dz. Haimey is the engineer on a salvage vessel, along with her crewmates Connla (the pilot), Singer (the shipmind), and Mephistopheles and Bushyasta (the ship’s cats), and together they bounce around the galaxy in search of hard-to-salvage wrecks. Oh, and there are space pirates and giant space seahorses. At least, I imagine them as giant space seahorses.

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Chocolat by Joanne Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s taken me twenty years to get around to reading Chocolat by Joanne Harris, and now that I’ve finished it I’m determined not to leave it as long to read the rest of the series.

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Fleet of Knives by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yet another fantastic outing for the Trouble Dog and her crew.

Fleet of Knives is the sequel to last year’s Embers of War and follows on from roughly where the last one left off. A year has passed and following a debriefing and some repairs Trouble Dog and her crew are off on a shakedown cruise, ostensibly to make sure everything’s running smoothly but also to give the crew a chance to patch up any psychological wounds they might still be suffering, when they’re called on to rescue some merchants stuck on a derelict generation ship. Meanwhile, the former Butcher of Pelepatarn, Ona Sudak, is facing death by firing squad for her past crimes only to find herself being whisked away to act as the biological controller of the titular fleet of knives, the Marble Armada.

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