Persephone Station by Stina Leicht

 

 

Reviewed by Ambrea

 

Rosie is the owner of Monk’s Bar, a famous place in the corporate town of West Brynner that caters to wealthy Earther tourists—and members of Persephone’s more terrifying criminal class.  They have lived planetside for a very long time, keeping secrets and local crime families in check; however, when a body shows up at their door, they decide to make a move that will change the course of Persephone forever.  Enter Angel:  an ex-marine, an honorable mercenary, and head of a semi-organized team of criminals, assassins, and former soldiers.  She and her squad will help Rosie with their problem—and, in the process, discover the truth about Persephone’s original inhabitants and redirect the planet’s future.

Persephone Station by Stina Leicht is an interesting book.  It combines several different story threads—Rosie and their secret history with Persephone, the Emissaries’ desperate fight for survival, Kennedy Liu and her quest for humanity, Angel and her search for redemption—and creates a sprawling space epic that stretches from the futuristic community of West Brynner to the fascinating (and dangerous) landscape of Persephone to the URW-controlled station above the planet.  It mixes together action, adventure, intrigue, mystery, space travel, and science fiction, creating a world full of characters who are complicated, deeply flawed, and incredibly human.

I enjoyed watching the complex relationships between characters unfurl (particularly between Vissia and Rosie), but, more importantly, I really liked seeing how the Angel and her team—Lou, Enid, and Sukyi—interacted.  I liked Rosie, because they were multifaceted and manipulative; I liked Kennedy, because she threw an interesting element into the story, regarding artificial intelligence, empathy, and humanity; but, most of all, I liked Angel and her friends, as they bickered and bantered, fought each other and together.

Honestly, it’s the characters who drive this entire story.  Even if I happened to lose track of the plot for a bit, I was always curious to see what became of the characters and I always wanted to learn more about them.  Would Rosie succeed in their machinations?  What would happen to Angel and her team?  Would Kennedy find the knowledge she sought?  It was all so thrilling and interesting, and I quickly became immersed in their individual stories. 

Overall, I enjoyed reading Persephone Station—which, I’ve learned, is a bit of a misleading title, since 95% of the story occurs planetside, rather than on the actual station—but I do have a few complaints.

You see, Persephone Station tries to do and be too many things at one time.  It wants to be a space opera and a political intrigue; it wants to be a survival story, a space-western, and a sci-fi action-adventure.  It features a native community struggling against corporate interests and space marines-turned-mercenaries and sentient AI systems gifted with empathy.  It’s almost too many things to bear at once and it makes the novel a bit heavy, a bit unwieldy, because I spent almost the entire time to gather up all the different threads and make sense of them.

Because this novel tries to do too many things at once, I feel like I missed out on some truly interesting stories.  For instance, I would have loved to learn more about Angel and Lou and their time as marines in the Thirteenth (otherwise known as the “Corpse Corp”); I wanted to delve deeper into Rosie’s and Vissia’s tangled histories with Persephone; and I would have liked to learn more about Sukyi, her past, and her daughter.  Not to mention, the background of the Emissaries would make an compelling book all on its own.

Persephone Station is a good novel, but it also has quite a bit of wasted potential and it’s chockful of stories that I wish the author had had more time to unravel.