The High Ground

May 30, 2016
A future interstellar empire is the setting of Snodgrass’s military space opera, told from the perspective of two misfits in the prestigious military academy known as the High Ground. One is Thracius “Tracy” Belmanor, a tailor’s son and scholarship student treated with contempt by the sons of the nobility around him; the other is Mercedes de Arango, the first woman to attend the High Ground, from which she must graduate to succeed her father, the emperor of the Solar League. As Tracy and Mercedes struggle with classism, sexism, and the weight of familial expectations and dreams, alien and human conspiracies threaten to undermine Mercedes’s future and that of the empire itself. Snodgrass’s worldbuilding has several creative touches: intriguing alien races, English and Spanish as the common languages of the Solar League, and the origin of the upper echelons of the nobility, known pointedly as the Fortune Five Hundred. The story is entertaining and briskly paced, if occasionally predictable; the conclusion is rushed and many plot threads are left for future sequels to resolve.

July 1, 2016

The emperor of the Solar League has no male heir, but he is determined to put his oldest child, daughter Mercedes, on the throne after him. To that end, he pressures her to enroll in the High Ground, the elite military academy that trains all the scions of the first families of the empire. Meanwhile, Tracy has been accepted to the school as a scholarship student, and he faces adjustments of his own from the wealthy pupils who question his right to be there. Their difficulties, different for each but no less isolating, make Mercedes and Tracy allies and perhaps more. Snodgrass, a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation, has a knack for the group dynamics of prep school, including the expected bullies and snobs. Her worldbuilding choices are a little more bizarre, with a future that appears to have a rigid class structure dominated by Spanish court customs and the Catholic Church. VERDICT The juxtapositions between courtly manners and teenage slang occasionally jars, but the author has such a sure hand for the action scenes that many will be eager for the next volume.--MM

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.