Navigational Entanglements

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By Aliette de Bodard

Publisher Description

A "Best of" Pick by Lit Hub | Amazon | New Scientist!

Award-winning author of The Red Scholar’s Wake Aliette de Bodard comes for your heart with a compelling tale of love, duty, and found-family in an exciting new space opera that brings xianxia-style martial arts to the stars.

Jockeying navigator clans guide spaceships through the Hollows: an area of space populated by the mysterious but deadly creatures known as Tanglers. When a Tangler escapes the Hollows for the first time in living memory, each clan must send a representative to help capture it—but the mission may be doomed and the hearts of two clan juniors may be in danger too.

Việt Nhi is not good with people. Or politics. Which is a problem when the Rooster clan sends her on the mission against her will, forcing her to work with an ill-matched group of squabbling teammates from rival clans, including one who she can’t avoid, and maybe doesn’t want to.

Hạc Cúc of the Snake clan has always been better at poisoning and stabbing than at making friends, but she’s drawn to Nhi’s perceptiveness and obliviousness to social conventions—including the ones that really should make Nhi think twice about spending time with her.

But when their imperial envoy and nominal leader is poisoned, this crew of expendable apprentices will have to learn to work together—fast—before the invisible Tangler can wreak havoc on a civilian city and destroy the fragile reputation of the clans. Along the way, Nhi and Hạc Cúc will have to learn the hardest lesson of all: to see past their own misconceptions and learn to trust their growing feelings for each other.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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1 Review

3.0

Sarah - SarahEvermotionsBooks

Created about 1 month ago

“TL;DR: Sadly, this maybe the most forgettable of Aliette De Bodard’s work for me. Source: NetGalley, thank you to the publisher! Plot: A group of young women are sent to hunt down a monster that has come from the dark reaches of space into inhabited space. Characters: This is probably where the book fell for me. The characters just did not work for me. Setting: I did enjoy the setting, I usually do with Aliette’s books, we had a few different ones but it was well drawn and interesting. Science Fiction: It was pretty light on details even though this was very much a SF. Thoughts: I’ve read a lot of Aliette De Bodard’s work. They are one of my auto buy authors in the SF sphere, but this one sadly is going to be a skip for me. Navigational Entanglements seems to be setting up a new world and cast of characters that may be kicking off a series? I’m not sure if I’ll continue to be honest, but I might give at least one more in this world a try. We follow a group of four women who are trying to track down a deep space creature that has appeared in inhabited space. There are a lot of questions early on such as why these four, and how the creature got released. All of these are answered and the story idea itself is great. However the characters were so abrasive that I had a hard time caring. We switch PoVs, so we see two different sides of the story. Our first is a young woman who clearly exhibits some traits from the Autistic spectrum (though never explicitly stated). She was intriguing and I did enjoy her at first! The second is a very gruff and frankly cruel young assassin who is very hard to like. The two eventually have a budding romance, but the story is very messy between the two. I found a lot of things about this hard to enjoy. The PoV of our Snake character, the cruel young assassin nearly made me put the book down. There was a LOT of interpersonal drama between all four characters that just muddied everything up. And finally the ‘I love you’ after knowing each other for a few days, and the just lack of real development through the story for these two. There was some growth at the end, not enough to convince me it’s going to to stick, but some. That will have me give the series, if it is one, at least one more try. But I don’t know if I can recommend this one widely. 2.5 out of 5 Creepy Tentacles”

About Aliette de Bodard

Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction: she has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award and six British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of A Fire Born of Exile, a sapphic Count of Monte Cristo in space (Gollancz/JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., 2023), and of Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances (JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc, 2022 BSFA Award winner), a fantasy of manners and murders set in an alternate 19th Century Vietnamese court. She lives in Paris.