The Reject by Edyth Bulbring

Edyth Bulbring brings her readers back to Juliet Seven's world in The Reject. Events in book one, The Mark, were left a little in the air, with Juliet escaped on board a stolen yacht with a price on her head while Mangeria was dumped into turmoil. There was no HEA for her and her love Nicholas.

It's going to be difficult to review The Reject without massive spoilers, so I'm not going to discuss specific plot points. At its heart, this is a quest-novel, with Juliet aiming to return to Mangeria and reunite with Nicholas. Except the Fates have other things in mind for her, and she's blown far off course with two major side-quests, as it were.

The story isn't straight-up SF, but blends in elements of fantasy as well, so be warned that occasionally there are dream-like sequences involving beasts of omen, like hadeda ibises and yes, even a great white shark. This novel reads far grittier and darker than I expected – Juliet is a hard young woman, and most certainly a product of her environment. This means that she's not particularly likeable, but her strong will to survive and yes, her bitterness, make a lot of sense. She doesn't allow folks to push her around. Or if they do push, she will find ways to push back.

I did feel that the pacing was a little off with The Reject, but then Edyth does compress a lot of time in the story – and although there are events that take place, they are almost lost in a kind of narrative summary. My suspicion is that this novel suffers a little bit of what I term as 'middle book syndrome' where there's a measure of setting up for a book three. Not that I've heard whether a book three is in the works, but it wouldn't surprise me a book were to drop at some point in the future. The first half of the novel feels like a detour, offering important back story, before it gets on the move again.

There are some pop-culture nods that made me smile, which I suspect may go a little over the head of readers who haven't watched older films. But I enjoyed the intertextuality. I will, however, suggest that folks might reread book one before dipping into book two, especially if some time has lapsed since the last read – and here the fault lies with me, the reader. I was a little overwhelmed with the cast of characters and their relationships in the last part of the story, where things really start moving. I think if I were more solidly grounded in the context, this wouldn't have been so much of a problem for me.

The Reject offers a cracker of a story, and when it really gets going, it rushes at a headlong pace, perhaps sometimes a little too fast, in my opinion. I would have liked to have seen more immersion in the world, a bit more tactile, sensory input to flesh the setting out. But these were not dealbreakers for me. I enjoyed seeing Juliet's interactions with the people around her, the way she's often in denial about her own feelings, and also how she tries (and perhaps even fails) to do better than the people in her past who let her down.