Yzabel / March 28, 2014

Shattered Veil by Tracy E. Banghart

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

When everything that defines you is stripped away, who do you become?

For Aris, a talented wingjet pilot, war means sacrificing everything: her home, her name, her face—and the one promise she swore she’d never break.

In the small village of Lux, everyone flies wingjets, but nobody flies them like Aris Haan. When she’s not dancing through the skies, she’s spending every minute with Calix, whom she’s loved since childhood. They plan to Promise, but instead he is sent to defend their dominion against a bloody invasion. Determined not to lose him, Aris follows, joining an underground network of women inside the male-only military. Using secret technology that allows her to pass as a man, she becomes “Aristos”, a Flyer in a search-and-rescue unit.

As Aris grows stronger on the battlefield and more comfortable in her guise as Aristos, her personal mission becomes less and less clear. When she and her enigmatic commander, Major Vidar, uncover an astonishing conspiracy that could destroy everything, she must make a choice that will determine not only the fate of her heart, but the future of her dominion.

Review:

[I got an eARC from netGalley some time ago, in exchange for an honest review. In the meantime, the book was officially published, so maybe my version isn’t up-to-date anymore, though.]

This book turned out to be a very good surprise for me. I had read two other novels by the same author, and while I’d certainly not call them bad, they just didn’t really “click” with me. However, I sensed that was probably due to my being somewhat jaded with similar stories, more than to any writing fault; when I read the blurb for Shattered Veil, I thought that maybe this story would do it for me.

Well, it did.

The novel is based on the classical girl-posing-as-a-boy theme, and I liked the way it progressed about it. First, the technology used to do so felt believable to me: more than just binding your breasts and hope that nobody finds out, and less than a perfect disguise, which left room for accidents to happen. (Basically—not a spoiler, as this is revealed early enough—it’s a holographic technology that makes one’s features look more male, but what’s under, curves included, remains the same, and the women still have to talk, walk, behave in as “manly” a way as possible. It’s not just a free pass allowing them to look like whatever they want. The people in charge also take many details into account, including pairing girls together, so that they won’t be found out by a genuine male bunk mate.)

Second, Aris, the main female character, evolved in a way I enjoyed. Scouted by a pilot who saw her amazing flying skills and thought she’d be a great asset to the army, she decides to take up on the offer… for the wrong reason: finding Calix, the boy she loves, and who’s been enrolled in the army. This was her only goal at first, perhaps more potent a motivator for her than her love of flying and the prospect of becoming a pilot, too. This was an annoying goal in my eyes; not that love in itself is bad, of course, but considering the scope of the war, and what might have been going on behind the scenes, it just felt… small. However, Aris doesn’t stop there, and along the course of the story, realises that there’s so much more to this than just being with Calix. There’s more to the world—and more to herself, the girl who was always somewhat coddled in her village because she was left with a limp after a fever.

Another great character in that regard was Dianthe. We don’t see her much, but that woman was definitely the no-bullshit type I appreciate greatly. From the beginning, she treats Aris as a human being, not as a frail girl, making her undergo training—probably what she would have needed back home in order to strengthen her muscles and have her limp less (considering that wasn’t a problem in the army later, it stands to logic that the lack of proper exercise in Aris’s life prior to joining the troops didn’t help). She doesn’t want to hear whining, she scoffs at the girl’s motives, but since those motives can carry her so far, she still gives her an opportunity to be recruited as a pilot, disguised as a man thanks to the “diatous veil” technology. Dianthe was an empowering figure, the first one who really put Aris on the path of becoming her own person, and not the image of her reflected in her parents’ and friends’ eyes.

And Aris definitely grows up. As she spends more and more time in the army, as she befriends other soldiers, including the girl who bunks with her, she starts to open up to other possibilities and opportunities, even though she must seize them under a false identity. She starts to see the bigger picture; to consider her own importance in the Search and Rescue team as someone who saves lives; to discover what she really wants to do; and to accept that it may not be what she wanted in the beginning.

Another good thing in this novel: it was light on the romance. It could’ve easily led to a love triangle, but it didn’t, and I was glad for that. The country’s at war, Aris does her job as a pilot, there’s no nonsense here about dilly-dallying about which love interest to pick (I really don’t like when the stakes are high, but the hero/ine wastes time on romance and clearly can’t prioritise). Aris does prioritise, on top of growing as a person, and that’s why she’s great. Granted, there were a couple of things that made me snort (like that moment when she and her mate talk of Aris’s dream about one of the officers, and one says something like “I haven’t felt like a girl in a really long time”—as if talking about men was a really defining feature of being a girl) but fortunately, such moments were few and far between.

One thing I would’ve liked to see more of, though, was the world-building. The world itself isn’t too hard to grasp (five dominions, each governed by an elected “Ward”), and the sci-fi aspect is light, so it won’t rebuke people who aren’t keen on hard science fiction. There’s a slight dystopian element, in that people are Selected into specific work areas when they become adults, and can’t leave them (being Unselected means very few places will hire you, and so on); also, the Military sector doesn’t allow women in, because of an obsolete law nobody ever cared to repel. I guess I would’ve liked to see more development on that side, as well as on geopolitics as a whole, to shed more light on the Ward of Ruslana subplot. (That subplot made sense and was well-used; I just like to know more in general, to get a proper grasp on a country/world when such a setting is concerned.) And maybe also some more information on how exactly women managed to stay in the army: they used variations on their real names (Aris Haan –> Aristos Haan), so how was this covered? Was some kind of “citizen database” tampered with? (I did say I like knowing more, didn’t I?)

This book is definitely worth reading in my opinion, especially for how it allows its main female character (and others) to walk a road of their own choosing, instead of staying in the little boxes society has put them into.