I'm not gonna lie, when I started reading this the first time, I DNF'd it an hour later. There was so much groundwork to get through with everything (characters, worldbuilding, etc.) and the pacing was really dragging. It wasn't until I was ranting about this book to a friend of mine that I realized why I couldn't get into this book -- I was expecting this to be something it was not.
I thought it'd be some action-packed scifi political thriller of some sort, but that was because of my own assumptions based on genre tropes. The book was not to be at fault because I thought it was going to be a story about one thing when, ultimately, it was meant to tell another story.
The one thing you have to keep in mind if you pick this up is this: Vagabonds is slow AF. But it's got decent payout for the time you invest into it (at least, that's how I felt when I got to the end). This book is, as I've seen other reviewers say, an extremely literary take on science fiction. You'll see a lot of "geo-political" space issues and discussions of classism heavily influenced by contemporary matters like most other sci-fi works, and this is also where the brunt of the "action" Vagabond presents. If you keep this in mind as you go into this work, you'll have a decent reading experience and come out of it relatively pleased (at least, I did!). If you're expecting intergalactic battles, then.... this ain't it, bud. Still was a great read.
I thought it'd be some action-packed scifi political thriller of some sort, but that was because of my own assumptions based on genre tropes. The book was not to be at fault because I thought it was going to be a story about one thing when, ultimately, it was meant to tell another story.
The one thing you have to keep in mind if you pick this up is this: Vagabonds is slow AF. But it's got decent payout for the time you invest into it (at least, that's how I felt when I got to the end). This book is, as I've seen other reviewers say, an extremely literary take on science fiction. You'll see a lot of "geo-political" space issues and discussions of classism heavily influenced by contemporary matters like most other sci-fi works, and this is also where the brunt of the "action" Vagabond presents. If you keep this in mind as you go into this work, you'll have a decent reading experience and come out of it relatively pleased (at least, I did!). If you're expecting intergalactic battles, then.... this ain't it, bud. Still was a great read.