This is a very difficult book to review, because it contains some good characters, a decent story line, and a lot (perhaps too much) of great hard science, well thought out. However, there are problems.
Writers who decide to keep secrets from their readers must tread a very fine line. If they give their readers too much information, the readers figure it all out too quickly, and that spoils the fun. If they give their readers too little information, readers feel cheated.
And the worst thing they can do is give the readers too little information hidden in a wealth of useless detail, so that the clues get skipped or lost.
And this is the main problem with “Trappist.” The first chapter of the story goes on for 37 pages, and then that plotline completely disappears for the rest of the book, to create a puzzle for us. We know that it must be important, but it is hardly mentioned again, and after a while, we forget about it. The only clues are a couple of “that person looks familiar” moments. That’s it.
Then we have a forty-page chapter on a different topic, which ends inconclusively. The next chapter starts a completely new story line, which doesn’t connect to the previous one for twenty pages. Then the real plot gets moving, and everything is quite straightforward.
There is a good swack of action sequences in the story, with all sorts of tension, against both the bad-guys and the dangers of space. It all ties together at the very end, where all is made clear.
The only element slowing down the action is the welter of detail presented in a rather haphazard manner that makes it difficult to understand what is going on. One particularly long section is about testing of electronic units, an incomprehensible process that takes days of story time and about thirty pages of the book.
I was also put off by the unexplained and unmotivated juvenile aggressive behaviour of one of the characters, who seems to be included solely for the purpose of creating interpersonal conflict.
In total, a good story with sympathetic main characters, tangled up with too much extra detail. Recommended for hard science fiction fans
(3 / 5)
This review was originally published in Reedsy Discovery