You ever get that feeling, when you’re in the company of new acquaintances who have themselves known each other a long time, like you’re missing out on a good portion of their conversation? Like, you’re hearing the words, you know their individual meanings, but your frame of reference is wrong. I don’t mean that awkwardness of when you’re overhearing a conversation being carried on in a different language and you suspect that at least some of it might be about you. (If you’re suitably paranoid, that is.) It’s more that feeling where the common language you use is given shades and levels of meaning to which you are not at all privy; where simile, metaphor and even syntax are so peculiar to this one group of people that you can’t help but feel a little like an outsider--mainly because you are, be you ever so welcome.

Well, that is exactly how newcomers to the Liaden Universe® would, I think, be bound to feel if they should commence their voyage with Ghost Ship. There is so much minutia in here, both implicit and explicit; so much that you need to know in order to get. I am very well acquainted with these people, and more than passingly fluent in their dialect, and even I found myself having to stop reading every now and then and think really hard -- sometimes for several minutes – before I would begin to have a shadow of an inkling of a clue of a vague memory as to exactly what past event was being referenced so offhandedly.

This is no bad thing, of course. Indeed, it is always a pleasure to spend time in a universe the details of which its architects are at least as well versed as its most ardent fan. Lee and Miller have lived here for so long that all things Liad clearly come very naturally to them, and when they bring up a tiny detail or long-past event that most would have forgotten, there is a palpable feeling of realness about it all, as though these are actual lives we are witnessing, albeit somewhat omnisciently, and for all their space-going and vendetta-foiling, the many scions of Clan Korval, with whom we mostly consort, could just as easily be members of our own families, with the same encyclopedic knowledge of every often meaningless happening out of a shared past.

But with better reflexes.

This is, in terms of the universe, a very big book; very much a family reunion. Old favorites return, and are very welcome sights: Val Con and Miri, Shan and Priscilla, Daav and Aelliana, of course, with side trip to Delgado and Kamele. Anthora, Pat Rin and Natesa are on deck, and even starchy Aunt Kareen shows up to make the newly Korval Theo nervous.

Oh, yes. There’s a whole lot of Theo.

Now, there are those -- even among the staff members of this very magazine! – who have perplexingly found the adventures of young Theo Waitley to be of far lesser interest than those of previous Liaden generations. I have personally loved her from her first pratfall in Fledgling, and continued to follow her with interest through Saltation, but I do kind of get it; instead of being a star-spanning and exhilarating romance or a thrill-a-minute espionage-filled adventure, Theo’s story has been very much in the standard Coming of Age mould, and a little bit YA paranormal too (she's just So Very Special) -- and besides, at times she really did seem quite disturbingly obsessed with tea.

But in Ghost Ship, Theo entirely holds her own, and as all the threads of the series-wide multi-faceted and many-splendored vastness are woven together neatly here, she plays a crucial role in what is a new and exciting -- if, naturally, dangerous -- chapter for all of Clan Korval.

If you are a Liaden adherent, but found Theo less than a riveting protagonist in her two previous outings, then I urge you to get back on board with Ghost Ship. And if you are not yet a Liaden adherent… then, good God, random person who is clearly insane and in need of serious guidance, go out, find yourself the seven books in the famed "Agent of Change" sequence (handily released by our friends at Baen in omnibus editions entitled The Dragon Variation, The Agent Gambit and Korval’s Game, plus last year’s Mouse and Dragon), and get with the damn program.

   -- Rachel Hyland