Reviews tagging 'Child death'

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding

4 reviews

bluejay21's review

adventurous funny hopeful lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death

Moderate: Injury/Injury detail and Alcohol

storyorc's review against another edition

adventurous lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Stellar action scenes. Wooding has the uncommon skill to get your heart pumping without a) losing sight of character, or b) confusing you. Even if you don't follow every individual maneuver, you have a clear enough idea of the flow of a battle to appreciate its highs and lows. As someone who has used many a Hollywood blockbuster action scenes as a bathroom break, I was delighted to find that the action scenes kept upping the stakes, revealing character, and introducing twists that made them more than just dogfight #3.

The pacing is a mad dash between action set pieces but there is the odd catch-your-breath conversation beat thrown in. In a world of airships, pirates, and daemons, I wouldn't want it any slower. There were instances of head-hopping in the middle of an already busy scene that could have used a paragraph break to spare me some confusion, however.

The trade-off for breakneck pacing is that only Frey, Crake, and Jez have any real page time for development. (And I mostly want Frey dead, but we'll get to that later.) Luckily, with the exception of the annoying idiot Pinn, thee generic members of the crew were fairly charming cardboard cutouts. Silo, in particular, was one of my favourites overall, thanks to his concept as the silent, hyper-competent engineer (and escaped slave to boot) despite only having a handful of lines and mostly existing to launder Frey's likeability.

And boy, did Darian Frey need it. I appreciate that his wolfish captain façade is dashed within his first chapters to reveal a trembling shell of a man and that we see him grow over the course of the novel but I dearly wish he'd died in this first chapter, leaving Crake and Jez thrust into the captaincy role. 

A solid redemption arc has two things:

1. Empathy for how a character became a piece of shit
2. A reason to root for them becoming less of one

Frey just does the piece of shit part really, really well. He's casually misogynistic*, he's a coward, and he's willing to betray his crew. Every new piece of his backstory we learn shows him enacting one of these faults so spectacularly that you would need a mountain of injustice against him to generate enough empathy to balance it. His becoming less of a piece of shit also relies mostly on snippets of inner monologue about how somehow, somewhere along the line, he started to care for his crew. This is nowhere near as convincing as the repeated acts of not caring we've born witness to. I tip my hat to him for two moments surrounding the Ketty Jay's ignition codes, particularly with Jez, but they cannot outweigh the abject horror that is his past with the pirate bitch queen Trinica Dracken. We learn that he despises her for the very normal reason that

she tried to kill herself when he left her at the altar and their unborn child didn't survive the attempt?? AFTER WHICH, she reveals she had to endure rape and whore herself out to advance in the world of pirates. And what does our rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold say to that? He calls her a ghoul and whines internally about how she's not pretty anymore. That ghoul is a kinder soul than me for not shooting him on the spot.

To pull off a character this awful would require so much more charisma than just being told he is hot - or at least for him to be fucked up in a more interesting way (like Crake!).

One aspect of the ending struck me as rather unpiratey too. Shockingly, I found myself agreeing with Pinn that

helping the cops destroy the pirate haven was no bueno. 100 pirate captains in one place and y'all can't think of a way to screw over the bad guys AND the navy? At least when Captain Jack Sparrow allied with the British, he had plans within plans.

As a final personal insult to myself, the book ends with instructions for how to play this world's version of poker. I'm someone who adores Geralt, yet any NPC who mentions Gwent is dead to me, and they want me to play a card game where drawing a single bad card can void basically any hand? (This is not a serious criticism, enjoy your games of Rake, it just made me laugh.)

On the whole, it delivered strongly on the airship front (lots of cool names for different classes of vehicle and allusions to how they're built), strong on the outlaw front (schemes galore), and the dash of occultism really flavoured up what was already a strong setting. However, if you're looking for a well-developed found family crew, watch Firefly or Guardians of the Galaxy instead, if you want a corrupt, grimy shipping world with less sexism, play Dishonored, and if you're looking for airship adventures with a less shit main character, read Airborn & Skybreaker.

*see my content warnings for details

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death and Child abuse

Moderate: Abortion, Rape, and Suicide attempt

Minor: Homophobia

Keep in mind this book was published in 2009 when setting your expectations for the levels of misogyny, racism, and homophobia. The crew has one woman. She is extremely competent, her "boyish" are suggested to go hand-in-hand with that competency, and she explicitly

does not return any romantic interest, and she has to do "appalling", "filthy" things to persuade someone to help the crew in a key moment

(spoilers light). Frey has seduced not one but two heiresses and treats both poorly. He also asks for "female company" as part of a business deal and these prostitutes show him favour later. The crew has one member whose skin is specified as non-white. He is a quiet type with few lines and also an ex-slave. Two separate ethnic groups are enslaved in the nation he escaped, with the darker-skinned race worse off, but also more prone to rebellion. The crew has one member who might??? be gay? He is aristocratic, appreciates the finer things, and finds another man "wolfishly handsome", but also takes offense to a joke that he might be gay. When he says the crew "maligns his sexuality", it is unclear if he is queer and offended that they think that joke-worthy, or if he's just straight and resents the implication. The crew briefly stays in a nation where sodomy is punishable by death. The description mocks this briefly and it is not addressed any further.

thebookishdesigner's review

adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

You hear that, Bess? We’re pirates now!”

I went into this one totally blind picking it up totally on a recommendation, and I’m so glad I did. Steampunk pirates? Sign me the hell up cap’n! 

“Frey is the captain of the Ketty Jay, leader of a small and highly dysfunctional band of layabouts. An inveterate womaniser and rogue, he and his gang make a living on the wrong side of the law, avoiding the heavily armed flying frigates of the Coalition Navy.” 

The absolute highlight of this book is the character work, as we progress through the story each crew member’s back story is revealed each as intriguing as the next, Crake’s backstory in particular was something else. 

In terms of the plot, Retribution Falls has the perfect balance of action, humour, and drama. It did take me a few chapters to start feeling comfortable with it but once we get to a certain point and the main plot line is revealed the story is fast paced and truly gripping. The more we learn about each character the more we care about them, with the stakes getting higher and higher the book becomes increasingly more unputdownable. 

I high recommend this book and can’t wait to carry on with the rest of the series and moving onto Wooding’s back catalog. If you do have tiggers I would advise looking at the tigger warning, most of these are only mentioned once but they are there no the less, some key ones that stand out: attempted unaliving of self, miscarriage and unaliving of a child. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: War

Moderate: Murder and Miscarriage

Minor: Slavery, Suicide attempt, and Child death

voelve's review against another edition

adventurous dark funny fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

If, based on other reviews of this book, you're looking for the novel version of the TV series 'Firefly', you will be sorely disappointed. There are some surface similarities - a found family of freebooters just trying to stay out of trouble and somehow getting in loads of trouble anyway - but that's about it.

This first book in the Tales of the Ketty Jay series introduces us to a wild world of political intrigue and airships. It's every man for themselves on this crew, but over the course of some 400 pages, we get to see them learn to not only actually cooperate, but strengthen and support each other. To nobody is this more surprising than one of our main characters, Captain Frey, a deeply selfish man. One of my favorite things about this book is that we're not supposed to like him, even as we experience the world through his eyes. While we remain surface-level acquaintances with most of the other protagonists, their stories are expanded upon in the next three books, where we are also drawn deeper into the central conspiracy.

Overall, Retribution Falls is a semi-dark, very fast paced story of blossoming friendships and troubled people trying to run away from their individual pasts. I'd recommend this one to any reader who's a fan of pirate stories, a steampunk-ish aesthetic, and the found family trope. Despite the gruesome content warnings, there is always an overarching theme of hope and a belief that with a little tenacity, they'll be able to make it.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Death, and Gun violence

Moderate: Addiction and Alcoholism

Minor: Rape