This book blew me away. It's a deep, rich story of the struggle to survive on Mercury amid deprivation and unforgiving conditions, initially focused on a teenage girl who is disabled in a horrible accident while she's still trying to figure out who she is, who she can trust, and what her adult life is going to look like, and intertwining her story with that of her grandmother, who was not much older than herself when the planet lost contact with Earth, and who became one of the colony's key figures due to her leadership and scientific contributions, all of which came with heavy costs. The two women don't always understand each other, but they do love each other, and you can see many ways in which the older woman's experiences with hardship influence the life she tries to give her granddaughter, even while her granddaughter is trying to break free of the past and find her own way forward. I loved it. The biggest flaw in the book is that the shift in tone between the two stories is so jarring. Adelheid's story is grim and desperate, full of dangers like forced culls and cannibalism. Each of her sections ends in a hair-raising cliffhanger, then the next section opens with Frieda upset, despite being surrounded by luxury and people deferring to her, because she isn't treated like an adult. I felt like the structure of the book did a disservice to Frieda, because her feelings about her situation are legitimate and would make a compelling story on their own, but contrasting her problems with Adelheid's at her age makes them seem silly and trivial. It isn't until the end of the book that Frieda's story starts to match the intensity of Adelheid's, and I loved seeing Frieda come into her own, but I felt like it almost came too easy to her. The track their city runs on is damaged, which seemed like a huge problem that would almost certainly end in disaster, but Frieda and her teenage friends easily deal with it while the adults around them, with decades of experience, are lost and helpless without someone to tell them what to do. The weakness of the ending prevented me from giving it 5 stars, but I enjoyed it a lot and would recommend it to anyone.

I loved that this involved Mercury in this scifi genre, it was unique and worked with what I was looking for. The characters had that overall storyline that I was looking for and enjoyed getting to know them in this world. James Bow wrote this well and left me wanting to read more.

James Bow has created an excellent community set on Mercury after the collapse of Earth from it's various futures. The citizens of Earth that now live on Mercury must learn complete self reliance as they constantly move around the planet to stay in the dark away from direct contact with the sun. Bow sets this community into a realistic apocalyptic event when all contact with outside planets is cut off. The sense of doom and the urgent situation cause an immediate assumption of control by Adelheid, now Queen of Mercury and regent of all of the citizens. This is the backstory as told in one half of this rather large tome. The second half is 50 years in the future when a message is received from an Earth that all thought destroyed. Adelheid's daughter is now Queen and her granddaughter heir assumpted. An accident will cause the death of the Queen and injury of the princess bringing dowager Queen Adelheid back to assist in ruling. The story is so well developed and the telling so seamless, you'll not come back to this world for anything.......harsh words could be in store for anyone trying to get your attention. Bow's skillful writing brings readers to an immersion in the story and it's fantastic predictions of an Earth that could sicken and die without massive intervention and maybe even then not be saved. It's all too easy to "see" this picture. Should he be able to maintain the strength of the characters as the story grows, he'll easily have a fan club.