Review: Alliance Unbound by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher


Review: Alliance Unbound by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher

I'm going to preface this by saying that I have loved most of what I read by Cherryh. And overall, I liked this book. However, and this is a big however, I felt like I must have missed the previous book in this series.* I felt a bit lost through much of this book. It was also poorly edited with some information repeated multiple times and other information given once, and never again. Like Downbelow Station, this book has a complex political setting, but there was way too much rumination by Ross Monahan.

The book opens with Ross trying to find his place with a new crew and a new ship. Most ships are crewed by literal families who take on the various roles within the crew from navigator to captain to kitchen staff. Ross and some of his Monahan cousins are displaced from their family's ship for a political situation that occurred in the first book. This situation is described several times. 

At 535 pages, this book is bloated. There is just too much of the wrong information repeated to for it to work as well as it could have. That said, I finished it and mostly enjoyed it. I'll probably go back and read Alliance Rising  and pick up the next volume when it's available.


*I totally did. The previous book, Alliance Rising, was published in 2019.

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