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Tales from the TBR: Ascension
Apr. 29th, 2018 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlmoose
The book: Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi
The summary:
Alana Quick is the best damned sky surgeon in Heliodor City, but repairing starship engines barely pays the bills. When the desperate crew of a cargo vessel stops by her shipyard looking for her spiritually advanced sister Nova, Alana stows away. Maybe her boldness will land her a long-term gig on the crew. But the Tangled Axon proves to be more than star-watching and plasma coils. The chief engineer thinks he's a wolf. The pilot fades in and out of existence. The captain is all blond hair, boots, and ego . . . and Alana can't keep her eyes off her. But there's little time for romance: Nova's in danger and someone will do anything--even destroying planets--to get their hands on her.
How I found it: My first Tales of the TBR title that I read as an ebook. I don't actually remember the details of why I bought, but it was at least a few years ago, when the book was fairly new. I think I was probably embarking on a trip and I wanted to have an ebook ready to go if I finished whatever else I was reading. Then it disappeared into my iBooks library, out of sight and out of mind.
What inspired me to read it now: My reading goals for 2018 include reading books I already own, writing more posts in this series, and reading new-to-me authors of color, and this book helps me meet all three goals.
The verdict: Overall, I enjoyed this book very well. The story undergoes a few drastic shifts in tone, so it took me a little while to get my footing, but the adjustments were worthwhile. This might be an artifact of how I read it: since I waited so long to start reading, and ebooks don't have blurbs on the back to set my expectations, I essentially went into this book cold, with no information beyond "this is a story about a woman of color in space." Maybe that's why I found the first few chapters to have such tonal whiplash. It starts out as a story about a working-class spaceship mechanic with a chronic illness struggling to get by but dreaming of more, then morphs briefly into to a fun space adventure when she stows away on a spaceship, the Tangled Axon, before taking a dark and serious turn into dealing with tragedy, loss, and grief.
At its core, though, this is a story about sisters. ( Cut for major spoilers. )
So if you're looking for a space adventure with a queer disabled protagonist of color, some steamy F/F romance, love triangles effectively solved with polyamory, a lady who falls in love with a spaceship, and you don't mind some dark turns, it's hard to go wrong with Ascension. I either didn't know or had forgotten that the book was on the 2014 Tiptree Honor List, and I would say it was a worthy honoree. (Hmm, maybe someday I should make a project of reading more Tiptree winners.) This book is billed as the first of a series; it looks like no other titles have yet been published. Fortunately, this book stands alone just fine, although I can also see it as the set-up for more tales of this spaceship crew and their adventures. And if Koyanagi ever decides to bring us back to her universe, I'm happy to come along for the ride.
