“Chimera”

Not a bad story, but it is for young adults.  I don’t qualify for that audience and haven’t for a long, long time.  Still, the book was interesting.

We have the usual young boy, young girl thing established early on.  Some secret meeting in a cave.  Nothing real exciting going on, just some cave etching the girl wants Theo to see.  Theo is a typical young boy trying to impress a girl, but never doing it the right way.  He’s certainly at the awkward stage.  In the cave, Theo is investigating the etching when he falls down a hole or rather he’s pulled through a very tight hole!  Bang!  Everything starts from there.

The story setting is in a far distant solar system.  Theo’s descendants have been banished from Earth for debts they cannot pay.  They have to inhabit this moon eking out payments back to Earth in the form of a rare mineral.  Well, the debts just about paid off but the ships from Earth bringing supplies stopped about 15 years too early.  Now the small colony is under a Mandate to conserve and rebuild the original colony ship that was dismantled to establish the original
colony.

Someone or a group of someones will have to go back to Earth to find out what’s happened.  Those someones will be the young adults that will be selected to crew the Chimera on her voyage back to Earth.  But, the Chimera isn’t just any spaceship.  She flies in Fractal Space which takes a special crew. The original crew is long dead so now it’s time to find a new crew.

There is a girl name Selena who’s about 15 and lives with her father out in the Rim.  They mine asteroids; capturing them and towing them in for the minerals they contain.  Selena has a spider, in her head!  She’s absolutely not supposed to fly her dad’s trawler, The Bee, but she does anyway!  You’re gonna either love Selena or hate her.  Bad attitude here she comes!

There is a murder mystery included in the story.  There are rewards and punishment.  And this is about young people growing up.  If you like those things, you’ll like this book.  It is well edited with only a few missing small words, much better than most books.

I’m looking forward to the second book in the story.