Grimspace

Grimspace is the kind of book the SF Romance subgenre needed in 2008 and did not always get: a confident first-person narrator with an actual job (interstellar navigator) and an actual problem (her last jump killed the rest of her crew, including the man she loved), pulled out of a psychiatric holding facility by a crew of mercenaries who want to use her abilities.

Ann Aguirre writes with a sentence rhythm that owes a real debt to Firefly-era Joss Whedon and to the better military SF of the early 2000s. Jax's voice is the engine. She is angry and damaged and frequently funny in a particular bleak way. The romance with the pilot March is the central thread, and Aguirre handles it with more honesty than the genre usually requires.

The plot machinery in the back half is slightly thin (the political conspiracy could have used another draft) but the texture and pace carry it. Four stars. A clean entry into a long series that is genuinely fun to be inside.