Honestly, I’m almost a little mad at how much I ended up liking this book. I was in no way in the right headspace for a super space opera’y sci fi book with a convicted murderer asexual half-unicorn hero, a lesbian wheelchair-bound angry ex-military antihero with a tree (dryad) for a wife, little gray aliens, stoneships that are alive with gnome guardians, and…. Um, literally everything else? Way too much world building for my current exhausted mental abilities … but fed to me in the right-sized pieces and all the right amounts of “humanity” (species-ity?), and I just … loved it. ( )

This book is not funny.

But it’s unicorns! In space! How can it not be funny?

Gary’s an asexual human/unicorn halfbreed, who murdered the woman he loved. Jenny held Gary captive for two years and tortured him to force him to power the ship she stole from him. Ricky is a liar and a cheater and a ruthless profiteer. Jim is a cantankerous old git.

Can they work together long enough to get the job done?

This book has so much heart. The characters are so achingly layered, so genuine in their flaws. None of it is whitewashed. There’s growth and development and endless striving for atonement but the wrongs are still real; they’re not diminished or forgotten.

A marvellously diverse cast set against a fantastic-yet-all-too believable world.

Comparisons? I'm not sure where to start. There are definitely shades of McMaster-Bujold's Vorkosigan saga to it. I suppose, much like Ethan of Athos, it looks (on the surface) like a story that should be hilarious. And while both have their moments, they're both so much more than that. ( )

I didn't get very far into this. The concept was fun - humans encounter aliens and it turns out aliens very closely resemble creatures from human mythology. But the opening chapters were a big long action scene, including a long complicated fight between lots of characters, and the action was really poorly written. It seemed very contradictory (one moment, the half-unicorn main character is talking about how heavy unicorns are, and the next moment, he's sitting in the lap of a woman in a wheelchair), and really confusing - I was trying to picture what was happening, and it really didn't make any sense. ( )

An excellent story. It has just the right amount of sarcasm and an edge that makes it hard to stop reading. And I really liked the throwback to the Haunted Mansion (not a spoiler)! ( )

Imaginative meld of fantasy and sci fi. We've gone into space and met dwarves, satyrs, unicorns and other fantasy critters. And what happened. Of course we had a war with them.

I enjoyed the story, the world building and the characterization. ( )