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A review by tome15
Fortuna by Kristyn Merbeth
3.0
Merbeth, Kristyn. Fortuna. Nova Vita Protocol No. 1. Orbit, 2019.
A dysfunctional family crewing a spaceship involved in an interplanetary smuggling business, doing battle with pirates and warring planetary governments—all this has promise, but there are a lot of dropped stitches. While we expect dysfunctional families to have flaws, there needs to be something savable in one of them, and we badly wish they did not take themselves so boringly seriously. The best character, the my-way-or-the-airlock mom, disappears, leaving a whiny bother and a drunken sister to duke it out. I did not care enough about either of them. The other siblings are left undeveloped. While many gushy reviewers have praised Merbeth’s world-building, there needs to be a lot more back story and some attention to planetary system design. How far apart are the worlds and habitats? Why did we colonize this lot and not some other? How did this smuggling operation get started? How does the spaceship work? Why did they name some planets after objects in our own solar system? Becky Chambers and James S. A. Corey do all this kind of thing much better.
A dysfunctional family crewing a spaceship involved in an interplanetary smuggling business, doing battle with pirates and warring planetary governments—all this has promise, but there are a lot of dropped stitches. While we expect dysfunctional families to have flaws, there needs to be something savable in one of them, and we badly wish they did not take themselves so boringly seriously. The best character, the my-way-or-the-airlock mom, disappears, leaving a whiny bother and a drunken sister to duke it out. I did not care enough about either of them. The other siblings are left undeveloped. While many gushy reviewers have praised Merbeth’s world-building, there needs to be a lot more back story and some attention to planetary system design. How far apart are the worlds and habitats? Why did we colonize this lot and not some other? How did this smuggling operation get started? How does the spaceship work? Why did they name some planets after objects in our own solar system? Becky Chambers and James S. A. Corey do all this kind of thing much better.