Another new read for me, and oh man, I really loved this one! Especially all the slice-of-life-on-a-spaceship details of life on board a merchanter ship. I mean, basically this is a boarding school novel IN SPACE, with extra bonus family feels, and of the Alliance-Union books I've read so far, this is the first to really go into details of worldbuildy stuff like how the ships are set up, how they trade, how jump really works (e.g. what's going on when they talk about the weird side effects of dumping velocity when they come out of a jump), and so forth from a ground-level, characters'-eye perspective. A side effect of the tight third-person POV she tends to use -- her characters generally don't explain things to the reader that they already know, and this is the first of the merchanter books I've read that's told largely from the POV of a character who isn't used to the ships, so we get to see how it's all set up as he learns about it. It also really expands the Alliance part of the universe, since we get to see so many of the space stations and get a feeling for them as unique places, along with all the changes that have happened since the war -- in a similar way to how we got to see the in-depth functioning of prewar life in Jupiter's asteroid belt in Heavy Time.

I think everything else I have to say about this book is spoilery, so it'll go under the cut ...

FLETCHER AND HIS DUCKLINGS. ♥ Aside from the details of life in space, that was far and away my favorite thing about the book. I was expecting a lot more of Fletcher's interaction with the older kids (aside from fights) and his grandmother, and was a little surprised not to get it, but Fletcher ending up in charge of three kids who come to absolutely worship the ground he walks on more than made up for it.

In general, the book ended up really surprising me a lot, but in small, down-to-earth, human ways. I had no idea Fletcher's main relationships in the book would end up being with the younger kids; I didn't anticipate anything about how the hisa stick subplot went. (Poor, well-intentioned Jeremy!) In general, I really liked the slow unfolding of the character relationships and the humanness of their flawed-but-well-intentioned ways of relating to each other. The central metaphor of the hisa "long walk" and Fletcher having to grow up in both the hisa and human ways was really well done, I thought; it was just a very well-structured book, and it really took the time to get to know the characters and develop their very plausible differences of outlook. She really likes doing that in a lot of her books (I get the impression that one of her favorite themes is putting together characters with fundamentally different views of the world and then turning them loose to bounce off each other) and the way it was developed in this book reminded me a lot of one of my favorite aspects of the Heavy Time/Hellburner duology too, especially Heavy Time -- there, it's Earth-born humanity versus the Company-bred, scarcity-focused Belters; here, it's station-born humanity versus the time-delayed merchanters. Especially fascinating to see that through the viewpoints of the kids, who are the most affected and the most noticeably different because of the time-stretched lives they lead. And it's also wrenching to see how they've been affected by the war, these children and young adults who've grown up dreaming of war, with no real idea what "after" might look like.

The only real issue I had with the book is that I wish I'd been more completely on board with Fletcher's happy ending. It really all ends up being Fletcher adapting to his new family rather than his family adapting to or trying to understand him, especially the apologies to the cousins at the end; the impression the rest of the family is left with, even at the end, is that Fletcher's objections in the beginning, to things like being press-ganged onto the ship or the initiation ritual, were really all down to Fletcher being childish and difficult, nothing to do with understanding what he was really losing or why he was reacting the way he was.

The troubling thing was, I agreed with Fletcher in the beginning that life with the Neiharts (or any merchanter family), as much as it's got its good points, is also claustrophobically insular, clannish, and limiting. I even felt like we saw the more unhappy side of their social isolation with JR, who ends up very alone, separated from being able to confide or talk to the only friends he has by his new responsibilities, but much too young to really fit in with the other captains. Their shipboard lifestyle means that they have no close social contacts except each other, but the rigidly hierarchical structure of shipboard life means that their close social connections are effectively limited to their age-mates, and they even lose most of those as they grow up and move into different positions on the ship. And due to the extremely limited number of job options on board ship, there just aren't that many things you can actually be without leaving everything behind.

So basically I wished Fletcher had gotten an ending that was less one-sided. I wish he hadn't been the only one in the wrong, from his new/old family's perspective. I wish he'd ended up with an ending that allowed him to salvage more of what he'd come on board with, rather than (for example) trading dreams of studying an entire planet for a job in a machine shop. (I mean, it doesn't have to be that way. The kid who was fascinated with Earth is going to get an actual chance to visit it, and exposure to many other cultures on space stations. He could've ended up bringing more of that social-scientist perspective and curiosity to his new family, rather than essentially having his dreams made smaller in order to fit in with theirs.)

... which sounds more unrelentingly negative than I really felt about the ending. It's also early days for Fletcher - we're only six months into a (presumably) lifetime on board the ship, still in the very early stages of adjusting, so there's no telling what the rest of his future is going to be like. And if his entire life was about trying to find somewhere to fit in, and people to love him, and a place to belong, he actually has found that. I just would've been happier if I'd ended up feeling like he hadn't had to trade so much of himself to get it.

But sometimes growing up is like that: you have to trade one thing you want to get another. And it made me look forward more to the new Alliance-Union book coming out next year, which I know deals in part with the Finity's End at the other end of the war. (I am both excited at the possibility of meeting Fletcher's namesake, and suspect that it will be absolutely soul-crushing if we do, knowing what happens to him ...)