Book Review: Salvage by Alexandra Duncan

Salvage
Author: Alexandra Duncan
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Dystopia
Released: April 1st 2014
Review Source: Greenwillow

Ava, a teenage girl living aboard the male-dominated deep space merchant ship Parastrata, faces betrayal, banishment, and death. Taking her fate into her own hands, she flees to the Gyre, a floating continent of garbage and scrap in the Pacific Ocean, in this thrilling, surprising, and thought-provoking debut novel that will appeal to fans of Across the Universe, by Beth Revis, and The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

Salvage follows a young girl, Ava, through a journey through space to Earth to escape death. She is aboard a ship called the Parastrata, a very male dominate ship, where women are to marry, cook, clean, and take care of children. Her journey starts when she is supposed to be married off, she hopes it is to Luck her friend Soli’s brother. They have an instant connection and want to be as one, but then a series of events unfold and she is sentenced to death. She keeps herself alive long enough to escape her impending death and travel aboard a ship to Earth. Salvage follows her while she learns how to adjust to gravity, take care of an orphan, and learn that everything is different from her home, the Parastrata.

I was so excited to start this book, to read some female dominate sci-fi, but once I started reading I found it was lacking something. To be honest it took me some time to get use to the new language used for the people aboard the ships in space. Once that was achieved I was always waiting for something to happen. Her escape from the death sentence and journey to Earth was thrilling and I was hoping for a sense of that throughout the book, but once Ava arrived it was a slow ride. I loved watching Ava develop relationships once she was on Earth, with her Aunt, Rushil, and Miyole. The way she cared for the safety of Miyole, who is orphaned, showed how strong inside she was. She is in this unknown land doing whatever she can for herself and a girl she just recently met. She was illiterate due to her home believing women didn’t need to have the knowledge if their men already knew it, but she was intelligent and was able to learn and discover so much with her time on Earth. She overcame a lot on her journey, but her journey for me was not thrilling like I thought it would be. The author was very descriptive and I was able to visualize the story unfolding and understand everything Ava was witnessing for the first time, like getting use to gravity.

This book wasn’t for me, but I know people out there will enjoy it. You follow a young girl through a journey of a lifetime, realizing everything is not what it seems. She learns to love and care for others, do whatever means possible. The book was very slow paced for me and lacked adventure that I was hoping for.