I read Allen Steele’s Coyote trilogy…*checks the reading page* good lord, in 2006. And really liked them, so I’ve been looking forward to reading SPINDRIFT for, uh. Years. I have no idea how long it’s been on my TBR shelf. Quite a while.
So I was disappointed when I bounced hard off the opening chapter/prologue/thing, and was wondering if I should go re-read the COYOTE books to see if they were, y’know, any good, and also to see what they refreshed about what this book was possibly supposed to be about, but I didn’t have them handy so I read a little farther, figuring I could give it a little more for nostalgia’s sake and if it still wasn’t any good I’d stop.
It improved dramatically in the next chapter. It took until the end to see why he’d done what he did with the first chapter and…yeah. I see why he did it. But if I hadn’t already been a fan of his books I might not have gotten past what he did. OTOH, if I wasn’t already a fan possibly I wouldn’t have been so struck by the coldness in the text and might not have thought anything of it and gone right ahead, who knows. And I didn’t like that it introduced a spoiler for later in the book that made me go “well here’s where that thing is going to happen” when I got to it.
Anyway: despite the opening chapter, I largely enjoyed the book. There were a couple of sexual dynamics things that I thought “meh” about, even if one of them came from a character who had pretty legitimate reason to be thinking along the lines they were, and which was actually resolved in an unexpectedly satisfying way. The plot itself was nothing new; it’s the characters who bring it to life, and the mildly problematic one mentioned above is really the most interesting of the lot, but the other two main characters and the supporting cast were well done and, yeah, overall enjoyable.
Furthermore, it made me want to re-read the COYOTE trilogy and I see he’s written two more books about Coyote since last I checked in, so, uh, I should probably clear off my TBR shelf before returning to Coyote. But I’d say, y’know, it did its job in making me want to buy more books by that writer, so there ya go.