A light-hearted and fun standalone space opera and SPSFC1 semi-finalist from Dave Dobson.

I picked up Daros during one of the big indie sales and oh boy was it a fun read. It’s been difficult picking between all the different books I grabbed during that one sale, and I’ve only swamped my TBR even more since then! But this isn’t supposed to be about my ever-growing TBR, even though at my average reading speed, it’ll take me over 3 years to get through. This is about Daros by Dave Dobson. It took me quite a while to read this book, but that’s not really the fault of the book itself. All I can do is offer my apologies for taking so long!

Blurb

Plunged into chaos
High above Daros, sixteen-year-old Brecca Vereen prepares to unload a cargo of trade goods aboard her father's ship, the Envy's Price. Nellen Vereen shows her a mysterious artifact bound for a contact below, one that will earn them a lot of credits, and one that they definitely won't be declaring to customs.

Materializing out of nowhere, alien invaders fire upon all ships, destroy the jump gate, and knock out communications. The Envy's Price is crippled, and as her father tries to guide it down from orbit, Brecca rescues the illicit artifact and jettisons in a life pod to an uncertain fate below.

On the flagship of the invading fleet, Navigator Frim tries to persist within the cruel autocracy of the Zeelin Hegemony, under constant threat of death, but wishing for something better. And then she notices a whisper of radiation above Daros – the trail of a cloaked Vonar ship. What are they doing in the midst of all this? And will the captain kill her just for revealing this disagreeable news?

Review

I’ll start this off by saying this book was great fun and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. The plot took me to places I didn’t expect, and the setting was excellent, with characters caught up in the midst of an interstellar invasion. I especially liked the Zeelin, and the chapters in which we followed Navigator Frim. I found seeing things from her perspective to be an imaginative and fascinating experience. The pacing was pretty spot on; I didn’t find anything that really slowed things down too much, and for the most part I enjoyed the prose. However, I did feel in some places that things were over-egged in terms of the characters considering the possible outcomes of certain situations. The author did a great job with the worldbuilding, however, and I especially enjoyed the lore appendix at the back! It reminded me of the Horrible Histories books.

In terms of characters, they were all really fantastic. In addition to Frim, I particularly enjoyed Lyra’s personality. I’m always drawn to sassy sentient AI spaceships in sci-fi. They’re always really interesting to read. Brecca herself was resourceful, and her considerations were believable. Guzma was fun as a weird meat-blob thing. I would like to have seen more of the humans in it, though. Near the start, Brecca meets up with a group of soldiers who are pretty interesting, but after she’s whisked away by Lyra, we don’t see much of them again, which is a bit of a shame.

All in all, I would really recommend Daros to anyone who wants a space opera that’s a bit light-hearted, with good humour and high stakes.