Review: Heavenbreaker

Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I suppose this book could fit into the recent "romantasy" craze (except it's more science fiction, albeit with a strong mythical Arthurian element). It has a bit of a young-adult feel, at least to me--the protagonists are nineteen and twenty, on either side of an apparently unbridgeable divide: noble and commoner, opponents in the fighting ring and enemies in their stratified society, drawn to one another nevertheless. This romance is a slow burn, with no explicit sex scenes a la Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, and is all the more effective for that. Lastly, instead of dragons there are mecha, giant robots the characters use to fight each other. In the case of the titular Heavenbreaker, the robot our protagonist Synali von Hauteclare pilots, it is a little more than just a giant robot: it contains an alien creature from the past that turns the story upside down.

Having said all this, and with the fact that I really liked the book once the pieces started coming together and the plot picked up, the science is pretty wonky. You can't think about it too much. The setting is about 1400 years in the future, after a war with a Lovecraftian tentacled hivemind creature that humanity lost. Earth has been destroyed, and humanity's remnants live in giant space stations that have been flung across the galaxy by the enemy, err, somehow. (If the enemy is supposed to have psychic teleportation powers, why didn't they just fling the Station that Synali lives on into the gas giant Esther and let the planet's pressure crush their enemies out of existence, rather than letting it settle into an apparently stable orbit? This is just one question you can't ask, because then the plot begins to unravel.)

But while this history gradually becomes more important as the story progresses, it's not the major theme of the book: the class differences of the Station, and Synali's quest for revenge following the murder of her mother by her father's noble house, are. Synali is a tightly wound, tormented, traumatized character, who takes her fury and channels it into the Supernova Cup, the ten-year competition she is pushed into entering by the former crown prince, with the stipulation that if she wins, he will bring down the murderous House of Hauteclare and give Synali the rest she longs for. Of course, she then meets a fellow rider, Rax Istra-Velrayd, who makes her think that perhaps she doesn't want to die after she gets her revenge after all.

All this requires a lot of careful setup, with the result that the book doesn't really get going until about halfway through. I was able to stick with it because the characters, especially Synali, Rain the royal assassin, and Synali's opponent and cousin Mirelle are compelling enough to take the reader through the somewhat uneven opening chapters and the hand-waving science. The ending is also a bit of an abrupt cliffhanger, but the endspage promises the story will continue in the next book, Hellrunner.

The book is tightly written and paced, if you can get past the faulty science. I will be picking up the next book.

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