Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

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, and I think that is what killed this. The story began to focus on that relationship, and with everything else going on it began to feel messy and like a bit too much.

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. The ‘I love you’ after knowing each other for a few days, and just the 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