A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

June 11, 2018
White’s assured debut is an entertaining throwback with some fun worldbuilding and two great lead characters. In the distant future, well after space has been colonized, almost all humans have magic powers, conveniently divided into RPG-like classes (machinists are great with tech, fatalists are perfect shots, etc.). One of the few who doesn’t is Boots, a former space rebel and reality TV star who makes a living producing fake salvage maps for desperate space captains, including her former captain, Cordell. While trying to avoid his retribution for her fraud, she runs across star race car driver Nilah, who has just survived an attack by a mysterious mage and a group of murderous mercenaries. Cordell captures them and brings them onto his ship, where they immediately meet the crew and help fight off an attack. As the adventure continues, plenty of White’s action doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny, and some expository dialogue is painful (“Malik has sleep magic. Keeps them young,” one person explains to Boots, who presumably already knows how sleep magic works). But this space adventure is calling back to an era when such flaws were woven into the genre, and readers looking for a modern take on it, complete with many female and nonwhite characters, will be pleased. Agent: Connor Goldsmith, Fuse Literary.

Starred review from May 15, 2018
Magic and technology take center stage in this ambitious start to the Salvagers series. Nilah Brio is a talented race-car driver, and her magic as a mechanist allows her to enhance her abilities to the top of her field. When a race is disrupted by an evil presence trying to kill her, she is transported to a space station where she meets Elizabeth Boots Elsworth, a woman with no magic but an innate ability to survive. The crew of the Capricious, a salvage outfit that Boots betrayed in the past, picks up Boots and Nilah, while their pursuers present both opportunity and danger to the crew. White (Every Mountain Made Low, 2016) combines magic and space opera to create a fast-paced adventure with charismatic characters and formidable enemies in a realized universe of greed and power. The crew of the Capricious evokes the camaraderie of well-received endeavors like TV's Firefly, and the stylized magical abilities supporting advanced technology evoke a Xanth-like sf story. Combined with a story line supported by well-placed expositions on the history of the characters, this novel is a welcome addition to the combination of space adventure and fantasy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)