Review: Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot

Title: Bluebird

Author: Ciel Pierlot

Length: 464 Pages

Category: Sci-Fi/Space Opera

Rating: 4 Stars

At a Glance: This is some tense and action-packed Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk with a heroine who gets by on a little snark and a lot of grit and determination. Despite the pace being slow in places, in the end, the story comes together to make for an overall fun read.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.

That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.

Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister—but for once she’s not alone. She has help from her network of resistance contacts, her taser-wielding librarian girlfriend, and a mysterious bounty hunter.

If Rig fails and her former faction finds what she stole from them, trillions of lives will be lost—including her sister’s. But if she succeeds, she might just pull the whole damn faction system down around their ears. Either way, she’s going to do it with panache and pizzazz.

Review: Ciel Pierlot’s Bluebird is a good old-fashioned swashbuckler of a tale, with a charming rogue of a heroine leading the way. It’s a multi-pronged story that takes place far off in a distant future, amongst the stars and planets, but the politics, sociopolitical conflicts, and ultra-high stakes coalesce to make a statement about the will not only to survive but to thrive.

“She promised herself, when she lit that first brick firestarter in her now-burning office, that she wasn’t going to be that person anymore. Their blind, obedient killer.”

Rig is the Han Solo of this space opera, for lack of a better description. Rig knows no laws under which she chooses to live; there is no faction to whom she desires to be compliant; she’s simply doing any- and everything she can to survive as an outsider and stay out of the crosshairs of those who wouldn’t mind seeing her dead. She’s a wanted woman who happens to have invented a weapon of mass destruction that could wipe out trillions of people, and she got so caught up in wondering if she could do it that she didn’t stop to think if she should do it. Now she has absconded with her intellectual property. Or stolen it—tomayto/tomahto. To sum up, Rig has got ninety-nine problems, and they’re all out to get her.

For some readers, it might be important to note that Bluebird is not a romance novel, though there are some romantic elements to it. Rig is truly, madly, and deeply in love with Jane, whose job as a librarian is next-level awesome, but therein also lies no small amount of conflict. The greater romantic storyline revolves around Ginka, a woman who gradually becomes Rig’s best friend and closest confidante, and Crane, the man to whom Ginka is illegally married. There are multiple storylines threaded throughout this novel, but everything, in the end, homes in on Rig and the band of friends she accumulates and brings together along the way to defeat evil and save lives.

This is some tense and action-packed Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk with a heroine who gets by on a little snark and a lot of grit and determination. I loved the friendship built between Rig and Ginka, and the themes that went into not only that but Rig discovering she wasn’t alone in her fight to keep her weapon out of the hands of the lunatic fringe masquerading as the law. Despite the pace being slow in places, in the end, the story comes together to make for an overall fun read.