Well, I have to admit that I don't generally love full-cast audio, so it took me a minute to get into this. Then the murmel started making noises and I discovered that it was well worth it. It's very YA, and I didn't necessarily love the action sequences. That said, it's also a totally fascinating world and I'm super glad I read it before starting Divinity 36, as it gives a delightful context. Great storytelling, good aliens, great relationships. ( )

Series Info/Source: This is set in the Tinkered Stars universe but standaalone. I borrowed a copy of this on ebook from my library.

Thoughts: I absolutely adore the Tinkered Starsong Trilogy and was incredibly excited to read another book set in that world. This ended up being okay but not nearly as well done or as fun as I expected. I think if I had read this before I read the Tinkered Starsong series I might have been more excited about it. That series set my expectations really high and additionally I didn't get the wonder about learning about this world since I already knew about it from that series.

This story follows Maura, a crudrat, who is getting too big for crud-ratting. Her and a friend start to dream up ways Maura might escape the Wheel. However, they are only dreams until Maura spots an alien getting led to prison and ends up involved in helping him escape.

This started out really slow and I really struggled to engage with Maura and the story. I was hoping that we would learn a lot more about the Wheel and Crudratting here and we do learn a bit more but it just wasn't built out as much as I had hoped. For the first 50% of this book I struggled to stay engaged, I kept putting the book down to find other things to do. There were also a lot of typos in the first parts of the book; misspellings, faulty punctuation...really basic stuff. I really wanted to love this though, so I stuck with it.

The second half of the book was a lot better. Maura gets to experience a new planet and see new species of aliens. I really enjoyed this a lot and thought Maura really came into her own as the story progressed. I loved that she knew her strengths and was happy to live up to those strengths rather than try to meet other people's expectations of her. I also loved that we saw other parts of cultures and aliens that were also talked about in the Tinkered Starsong series, this built out some of the races better for me. I did think things ended very unfinished feeling and would love to see a book that builds out more of Maura's story.

So, I am a bit torn on this one. I really loved the second half of the book but thought the first half was slow and awkward. This book really needs some better editing, luckily I borrowed this from the library and didn't purchase it, so I don't own this poorly edited book. Hopefully they will push out an updated, edited version at some point.

My Summary (3.5/5): Overall I am glad I read this but really struggled with both the beginning of the book and the poor editing. I oscillated between 3 and 4 stars, so ultimately decided on 3.5 stars. The real question is whether or not I will read "The 5th Gender". I am a bit reluctant too because of how poorly edited this book was, but I do love this world and would like to read stories set in it.. I would definitely recommend reading The Tinkered Starsong series over this series. This book does give some additional background on The Wheel, but I am not sure if it was enough background to enhance my enjoyment of The Tinkered Starsong series. ( )

Great book. The story is good, world building is good, and I enjoyed the characters. I thought the Killki mayor was unfair in her treatment of Maura, even if she was portrayed as being fair, but it seems like she was honourable in her own way. I don't particularly like some of the judgement and high-handedness, but that is part of the story.
I did like the scope of the story, Maura finding her way in this new society. I'm very much looking forward to a sequel! ( )

I loved this! Not surprising from one of my favorite authors. But this was a new series and a new world. I loved the way language was adapted for different cultures and it took a bit to figure out what the words meant but you could totally follow the story.

I hope this becomes a series since I want to know what happens next. Too many fates left open, although everything was sort of wrapped up in the end. Very different from the Parasol Protectorate universe, but awesome on its own. ( )

Crudrat by Gail Carriger is a Kickstarted audiobook that I backed last year. It will soon be available to non-Kickstarter backers in both audio and ebook forms. Although I got both ebook and audiobook versions for backing, I consumed the audiobook version and I've only opened the ebook to check name spellings. Oh, and it's not in any way related to Gail Carriger's steampunk novels.

The Progenitors of The Wheel live high up above the sky, amongst the stars, removed from the petty concerns of mere mortals. Each one designed, engineered, perfect; their imperfect children get left to die.

Ghosts. Cyphers. They do not exist. A lucky few, the Crudrats, scrape out a perilous living cleaning the toxic wastes from the great machines that power the station.

Meet Maura. Cypher. Crudrat. Grown too tall, alone in a spaceport with no use for her, doomed to starve. With only her crud-eating murmel and an alien monster to help her, she must find a way to survive, or escape, before they catch her and blow what’s left of her life, and her companions, into space.

As I said, this was a very different book to Gail Carriger's other work. It's science fiction and not a comedy. Also, the main character is twelve or thirteen, which I think is even younger than the Finishing School characters. She does have a cute pet, though, but I think that's the only common element. Maura's life starts off as bleak as a Dickensian orphan's until a luck and a chance encounter basically save her life and allow her to get off the space station she was born on and to a better society where she has a chance to, well, not be dead within a year.

I'm a big fan of Carriger's other books, but this one took me longer to get into than I expected. I think there are a few contributing factors. First up, I'm not used to listening to audiobooks with special effects and — especially — background music. In the opening scene, especially, the music was louder than I would've liked — relative to the words — and a bit much when trying to first get my bearings in a new story with setting and characters to learn. I think there were similarly directed scenes later on which didn't bother me in the same way.

Another thing that bothered me was the dialect of the crudrats speak. It just grated. I suspect the reason I enjoyed the second half of the book more was because Maura was in a different setting, trying to fit in (to a degree), and the people around her spoke in a different dialogue that didn't bother me.

What I liked was the view Carriger gave us of different societies and, particularly completely different societal systems. Showing the difference between an urchin and aristocrats (or their equivalents) is one thing, but then showing us a society where neither concepts exist is another thing entirely. Furthermore, everyone in Crudrat is a genetically engineered human (or their antecedents were genetically engineered), even the people Maura thinks are aliens. I was left wondering whether the particularly broad selection of phenotypes was a stand-in for race. Probably not. On the Wheel phenotype seemed more indicative of social class with crudrats being stained blue because of the dangerous work they do (they clean crud off shafts with blades slicing through them, a construct that initially reminded me of Galaxy Quest and the urge to make SF settings dangerous for purposes of entertainment) and the upper classes are selectively bread. But on the other hand, the society Maura encounters after leaving the Wheel has humans from different "original" habitats living together in equality (or meritocracy, at least).

I enjoyed Maura's disbelief at how the society worked. Not only did it work well for setting the scene, but the complete lack of mutual understanding was entertaining, especially when no one believed her about her previous job. (Because why would you power a space station with giant blades and use orphans to clean them?) I also really liked that some cursory attention was paid to the laws of physics, though I can see why my talk of giant blades — which are part of dark matter engines — may not lead you to think so. It's certainly not hard SF, but there were no stupid errors/misconceptions that made me want to punch things, so that's automatically a win.

Anyway, Crudrat was ultimately enjoyable and I would read a sequel (although I'm not sure that one is forthcoming). I recommend it to fans of adventure-style SF and coming of age stories. I highly recommend not going into it expecting something like Soulless, because your expectations will not be met in the slightest. If you like full-cast audiobooks/productions then definitely get a hold of the Crudrat audiobook.

4 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. ( )