Last one today, I promise (for those whose friends-list is filling up with my book blogging). I’m determined to catch up on a Cherryh kick I went through a few months ago but didn’t get around to blogging.

Yet another of her Alliance/Union books, this is one of the Merchanter-based ones, though it also includes the Fleet. It’s a fairly late on in the post-Company Wars era, so still directly linked to the events of Downbelow Station rather than much further down the timeline.

This is the coming-of-age story of a young man whose upbringing has been screwed up royally by his screwed up mother and her complacent self-satisfied family, on a classic Merchanter family trading ship. Conceived in a rape but as we eventually find out one which while the victim didn’t deserve (no one ever does) the victim was hardly a sensible and sane woman to start with.

We get Cherryh’s over-the-shoulder third person trademark on multiple characters in this story and as with a number of her other books she remarkably manageds to make some really screwed up and nasty people really work as main characters. It helps that the main character Joh Bowe Hawkins is as sane and positive a character as he can be given his background. His coming-of-age is the main point of the book, behind which is an explanation of some of what happened to the Earth Company Fleet after Downbelow Station. Wonderfully ethically-grey as much of Cherryh’s writing is, this explores some of the darker sides of the human character and comes out with a message that even the most screwed around can posibly find somewhere to fit in.

A nice addition to the Merchanter set and one of my favourites of that subsqeuence, along with Rimrunners.