Thursday, December 8, 2011

Grimspace (Sirantha Jax, #1)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sirantha Jax is one cool name.

She's a jumper. Jumpers are people gifted with a special J-gene who can take entire spaceships from one place in space to another through Grimspace, something similar to the hyperspace in Star Wars et al., a dimension which allows you to travel light years in no time. When we meet Sirantha, she's in a really bad shape. Locked up in a cell, she's the sole survivor of the Sargasso shipwreck, a spaceship which carried a whole congregate of diplomats and which was piloted by the love of her life, Kai. They're all dead now and apparently, she is responsible for that. If only she could remember. On the verge of having her mind broken by Psychs, Sirantha gets rescued by March, a mercenary working for a clan on planet Lachion, whose agenda is to use Sirantha to recruit and train potential jumpers to overrule the Corp's monopoly on this privileged profession. All kinds of trouble ensues.
I'm going to stop here with the synopsis because it is extremely complicated to condensate in a few sentences and I'm sure your eyes already glazed over.

When you start Grimspace, Aguirre mercilessly dumps you in the middle of a universe (literal and physical) with no background information whatsoever, nonchalantly assuming you were there before she started narrating and you knew everything about the conformation of the universe, about the planets or the infamous Axis Wars, etc.
There's quite a lot of infodump to digest at the beginning, the world building is complex and dense but believe me, by the end of this first book, you will have all your facts straight and you'll be sucked so deep in the Sirantha-verse, it'll be impossible to stop reading.

Science fiction isn't my genre really, of course I watched Star Wars and Dune and a few others but, as you can deduce from my "and a few others" remark, I'm far from being an expert. If you're like me, you will love Sirantha, I think.
She is such a witty, strong yet flawed heroine. She's both smart and a bad-ass and very unapologetically unafraid to show us her worse side of selfish, uncaring bitch. I'm starting book 3 as I am writing this and I can tell you there's a lot of character development to come and Aguirre masterfully manages to make the reader very attached to all the characters she introduces. They are all so cool, unique and alive, there isn't really one that left me indifferent.

Another good reason why you should read this series is that - and I have it on good authority - there is no love triangle throughout the whole series. So far, as long as romance is concerned, I've witnessed quite a lot of indecisiveness, angst and miscommunication but no table tennis effect, which is really refreshing. So no eye-rolling impulse... but a lot of head-smacking, yes. And smut too, and in the right amount! Nothing throbbing here, I promise.

The story is fast-paced, with a lot of good action, amazing fight scenes and cool gadgets typical of science-fiction, so there is no way you will find this book boring and I assure you it gets even more interesting in the sequels.
So far, there are 5 books out and the final one is coming out in September, which is another reason to pick up this series, if you needed more.

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