Revenger (Revenger #1), by Alastair Reynolds

I've read some books in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation series and I more or less liked them. So when I've heard of a new book from the same author I've decided to try it. The result is mixed. For most of Revenger I disliked the characters and the story, but the ideas in it made me want to see what was going to happen next.

What you need to understand is that this is a straight pirate story, only set in the future and in space. It starts with two girls that decide to leave their world and join a spaceship crew in order to make some money. Only they get jumped by pirates, so one of the girls must fight the system and her own nature to become hard enough to find the pirates and save her sister.

The problem is that the characters are hard to empathize with, are pretty inconsistent and always stretch belief in this world in which space crews are uneducated louts speaking in jargon and going from world to world in search for ancient technology they cannot understand that was left by long gone alien races. The only part of the book that made me want to read the next one was the very end, the rest was people acting weird, not thinking too much and speaking a lot.

Bottom line: I can't recommend the book. I might read the next one, after all the books in Revelation Space had wildly varying degrees of quality. The ideas are nice, the implementation is what hurts the book.