Heritage of Flight

Susan Shwartz was my random pick for the Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge. Heritage of Flight was her only book listed on the site, thanks to its PKD Award nomination. It sounded interesting, and was available at a fair price as an ebook, so I decided to go ahead and read it.

I have to say I didn't find it a complete success. It just didn't seem to hang together as a story as well as I'd hoped. I don't know if the four sections were originally published separately, but they did seem to recap enough information to stand apart.

The story concerns a small impromptu colony of refugees from a damaging interstellar war, and their attempts to survive, not knowing if they'll be picked up, or if the rest of humanity will destroy itself.

There are four self-contained sections, dealing with key incidents in the colony's life. The characters didn't particularly grab me, and their actions seemed to be unreasonable, at times, particularly one of they key decisions with repercussions throughout the book.

In the end it was a book I wanted to like, but which didn't really satisfy.