Revenger

Revenger by Alastair Reynolds was not marketed as young adult fiction but I guess it's the young protagonist and the straightforward space opera story that led it to get classified as such, the book even winning the 2017 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. A praise quote on the back cover from SFX claims the novel to be the most enjoyable of Reynolds's books. I'm not sure if that's quite true -- especially now with almost another full decade of books from the author in the mix -- but Revenger is definitely from the top end.

The book's setting is eons into the future. Humanity lives scattered on 50 million habitats that form sort of a Dyson swarm. Characters speak of the "Old Sun", which I guess is just our Sun but much older. There are no mentions of planets -- maybe they got used in building the swarm? Eras are counted in Occupations -- whose, I wonder. There are alien species too: such as crawlers and beetles (or whatever they're called originally in English -- I read the book in Finnish). They're not in central part of the story but one notable detail is that they have controlled the system's banks after humans' stock market crashed and burned.

The big picture was left pretty vague for the reader and so it is largely for the characters, too. A lot of the ancient history has been lost and so have the most advanced technology of ages past. Spacecrafts called sunjammers with small crews travel around the system on solar sails, raiding "baubles", ancient vaults of some sort that are open only for short periods of time until becoming impenetrable again for a longer period of time. Assuming no one has scavenged them clean before, these baubles hold artifacts and technology that can be used or sold for profit.

The sunjammers and baubles feel like a video game premise: there are many co-op titles these days with very similar setups -- not as many back in 2016, though.

A sunjammer crew needs many specialists: one of them a bone reader, someone who is able to interface with an ancient alien skull each ship usually has. The skulls are used for instantaneous communication. The book's protagonist Arafura Ness soon becomes a bone reader.

Arafura and her slightly older sister Adrana were born to a wealthy family, although the success rate of their father's investments has been a continuous downward spiral, their mother's death not helping matters. Adrana wants on an adventure and has already been tested in secret to have talent to be a bone reader. She talks Arafura into running away with her, presuming her sister to have the same talent, and they enlist on a sunjammer called Monetta's Mourn.

I couldn't help but notice how Arafura and Adrana are akin to Juliette and Clarissa Mao from The Expanse. I wouldn't be surprised if they had been Reynolds's source of inspiration. The Mao sisters are likewise from a rich family and are resourceful survivors. Like Clarissa, Arafura ends up on a quest for revenge and becomes rather callous on it -- surprisingly callous, even.

Reynolds gets to excuse it with how Fura at one point, in order to survive, eats the organic cabling sunjammers tend to have. It is edible but Fura wasn't aware it needs to be boiled first lest one risks of contracting glow fever that tends to make people obsessive if it reaches their brain. It is worrying that Fura doesn't seem to mind the fever, not seeking treatment and still literally glowing at the end of the book.

The story continues in Shadow Captain and Bone Silence after that -- the latter's name finally makes some sense.