Review: Fortune's Pawn

Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is the type that's right up my alley. It's full of action, includes psychic abilities, has creatures, thrills and mysteries... and battles. Space battles, in this case. It's a formula I tend to love.

I love kick-ass heroines. I adore bad-asses. Not to mention warriors and freaking fantastic armour (the Lady Grey was a character herself, in my head).

My suit was the color of morning mist, a light, silvery gray chased through with a spiraling pattern that was only visible in direct light. It was a speed suit, built for strength and flexibility, but the money I’d spent really showed in the suit’s size. Usually, size is a good indicator of the strength potential for a suit of powered armor, but not always.
...
Even I’d been a little skeptical when the Master Armorsmith first showed me her power ratings, but my worries had died the first time I’d put the Lady on. Over the two and a half years we’d been together, my suit had jumped me hundreds of feet onto escaping thruster ships and punched armored combat marines through bulkheads without pushing into the red.
She might look like a light racing suit, but my Lady was ruthless to those who underestimated her, or me, and I’ve never regretted a cent of the fortune I’d paid for her.

I read about the Lady Grey and I think of a combination of these:

Aside from the Lady Grey, Devi loves her weapons so much that she names them. Mia the plasma shotgun, Sasha the armour-piercing pistol, Phoebe and Elsie the thermite blades. I can get behind that.

I have a habit of recording and rewatching just the action scenes from movies and TV series because I love them so much. When it comes to the action scenes in this book, Rachel Bach delivers in spades. She says Devi was partially inspired by Ellen Ripley from Aliens and Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender, among others, while the armour and the Paradoxians were influenced by Warhammer 40K. The action scenes certainly reminded me of a mix of Aliens, Edge of Tomorrow, Alita: Battle Angel, Mad Max: Fury Road and even some Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Very few authors can actually craft action scenes that literally make me feel like I'm watching a movie. Right from the very first one.

I was in the air before he finished. The Lady Gray couldn’t fly, but she could jump so high and fast it didn’t matter. I shot up until I was eye level with the cargo bay lights and then dropped, flipping in midair to land hard with both feet on Cotter’s broad shoulders. I’d angled to land right on the weight balancer that kept his tank of a suit upright, and my impact sent him tilting with a strangled gasp. It only knocked him for a moment, but a moment was all I needed.

I reached down and popped the hidden safety that’s always in the same place on assembly-line suits, yanking up his face shield with one hand while my other dove to grab his now-bared throat. It was a move that would never have worked on small armor like mine, but then people who wore reasonably sized suits rarely needed this sort of discipline. The moment I touched him, Cotter froze. Snapping his neck would be nothing to my armor-powered hand, and he knew it.



It took me a while to warm up to Devi Morris; she tries hard to be a stone-cold bitch but sometimes she's just an arrogant asshole. She has nothing to apologise for when it comes to being an incredible warrior, though.

"I was born a bossy bitch, so you can either roll with it or get rolled over."

Then there's the Glorious Fool and her crew. Basil, the aeon (Big Bird with an attitude); Hyruk, the giant reptilian ship's doctor; Nova, the navigator (Luna Lovegood and Kaylee rolled into one); Mabel, the ship's engineer; Caldswell, the captain; and of course Rupert, the cook, who's Devi's love interest.

I'll be honest, the romance wasn't my favourite part of the book, but it made for an important part of the plot development (though thankfully, not the focus). It drove a large part of Devi's motivations, for better or worse, and while I thought she made some foolish decisions because of it, they mostly made sense in the context of the story.

I could have happily read the entire book as a pure action-fest, and there's more than enough to satisfy an action junkie like me. Honestly, this would make a fantastic movie (trilogy, given the other books in the set). But there's so much more, especially the interplay of the various species and the world-building, the hyper-jumps and the plasmex (a type of energy - like the Force, it's present in everything) and of course, the relationships between characters. Also snark. So much snark.

“If it makes you feel better, though, Basil is the first on my list if we’re ever stranded in deep space and forced to eat one another. Aeons are most delicious.”

TL;DR: It's probably considered light reading, but I don't care. It's comfort reading with thrills and action galore and I stan.

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