Jitterbug by Gareth L. Powell: review

3/5 stars on Goodreads

Jitterbug by Gareth L. Powell

Jitterbug is set in near future of our solar system that’s been drastically altered. All the outer planets have vanished one by one by invisible forces, with Mars being currently devoured. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth is gone. In their place has appeared a ring of artificial planetoids shaped like wedges of orange that curve towards the sun with nothing on the backside towards the outer space. The humanity has inhabited the insides of these planetoids.

Criminals, too, like to hide in the vastness of these new habitats, and to capture them, a system of bounty hunters has emerged. Copernicus Brown and his three-person crew (two women and a man) are bounty hunters on Jitterbug, a former freight ship he has inherited from his father. A distress call brings them to a scene of a pirate attack, from which they save a woman, Amber Roth. Things go sideways from there.

Roth is carrying a message that people are willing to kill for. It brings the crew to the attention of a leading politician, and together, they go to the outside of the spheres to find the origin of the message—only to learn that the humanity is about to come under attack by alien forces. Are they the same who created the sphere in the first place or is something else going on? Whatever it is, Jitterbug and her crew has to deal with it and fast.

This was a competent sci-fi adventure, a small-scale space opera. Told by four first-person point of view characters, one of which is Jitterbug herself, it brings the humanity to the brink of extinction and offers an out of space and time solution to it. It wasn’t entirely engaging though. It was mostly narrated to the reader, and apart from the first chapters, the first-person narrators didn’t manage to bring the reader in the story with them. The intimacy of first-person wasn’t there, and the reader didn’t learn anything about the characters except what was necessary for the scene. The inevitable romance especially suffered from this, when neither narrator even hinted at romantic feelings before it was already a reality.

The ending twisted this readers brain, but I’m not going to question the time-bending solution. It brings the story to a full circle, the prologue finally getting an explanation in the epilogue. It’s a satisfying ending for this standalone story. No need for more.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.