Review: Fair Trade by Jolie Mason

Fast-paced interstellar love and peril, bright and full of verve

I've always had a soft spot for merchant-trader science fiction. Maybe it goes back to a childhood of reading Andre Norton or teenage years playing the old Traveller s.f. RPG. My point is, the summary blurb for this novella had me on its side from pretty much the first sentence, and the story itself did the same.

Fair Trade tells the story of a lonely guild trader by the name of Jexa Maru. Capable, independent, and hardened by a harsh life among the stars, Jexa owns her own ship, a sidearm to face down anyone who might try to take it from her, and not much else. Her weeks, months, and years are spent alone aboard the Misha Anton, earning just enough on the trade routes to keep herself fed and the ship in decent repair. The seedy ports of the Pisces Nebula hold little allure for her beyond their opportunities for cargo, and she never stays planetside for long.

Nor should she, given the lawlessness of the Pisces worlds, where the Calypso slaving syndicate plies its trade with impunity.

Try as she might to keep her head down and avoid the Calypso, however, Jexa instead finds herself yanked straight into the pirates' cross-hairs when an escaped slave stows away in her cargo hold -- a slave who for some reason is more valuable to the syndicate than the fragile treaties that maintain balance within the Pisces Nebula. Along with Calypso's enmity, Joss Bandalau brings aboard the Misha Anton a presence and companionship that Jexa has never known -- and a dark mystery of what befell him at the slavers' hands before he made his escape.

Author Jolie Mason populates her universe with compelling, strongly drawn characters and moves them through a corner of the galaxy rife with brutal color and stark with the emptiness of space. It's a given that Jexa and Joss will fall for each other, but it's less certain how their individual lives of isolation and suffering will fit together -- or how they can escape the hell-bent pursuit of Joss's former owners.

I enjoyed Fair Trade start-to-finish. I'm a sucker for a good romance, an underdog story, and a tale of far wandering among perilous stars. This book delivers on all those points. That's not to say that it's perfect -- it doesn't maintain the plucky ingenuity of its protagonists uniformly throughout, slipping occasionally into conveniences of plot that I'd rather have seen tightened up. There are also some typical self-publishing lapses of editing. But the book's spirit of adventure and central heart of human connection never flag. It's a breezy, fun, quick read with flashes of brilliance, thoughtful undercurrents in its depths, and a setting that's larger than any single story -- a place I wouldn't mind coming back to for future reading.