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buttonsbeadslace's reviews
196 reviews
3.0
4.0
Over the course of this book I went from kind of critical and confused to loving all the main characters and wishing I'd read this before some of his other books.
David Drake writes about people who are cold and numb because they've suffered a lot. In this book, we have Captain Daniel Leary, a wildly successful war hero returning home after the signing of a peace treaty in a badly damaged ship. His best friend and communications officer, Adele Mundy, grew up alone in a slum after every other member of her aristocratic family-- including her ten-year-old sister-- was executed for political reasons. They've both seen a lot of death, and because they're so matter-of-fact about it, it can be hard to see that they actually do have emotions. The things that show their personalities-- that establish them as characters, rather than the implacable robots they sometimes have to be to do their jobs-- are all very subtle. But once I caught on, I fell in love with both Daniel and Adele.
I also appreciate the attention paid to why the main conflict of the story-- an attempted takeover of a very minor backwater planet by a slightly less minor empire-- happens at all. Though I probably wouldn't have noticed if the author didn't explain it in the introduction.
And I like how Daniel is notionally the main character-- he's the captain of the ship, the book starts with him and his family, the blurb makes it sound like he's the main character-- but as much or more of the book is from Adele's point of view, rather than his. Many similar books are really about a man and his female sidekick, but What Distant Deeps is about a man and a woman, with very different perspectives and skills, who care about each other and make an excellent team.