Owner's Share

This is the best of the series. I find most series go downhill after so many. But not this series! I laughed and felt joy for Ish. Watching his growth over the course of his life was nothing short of epic. But this book really showcased all of who he is. We really hadn't seen anything truly bad happen to Ish not since the beginning when his mother was killed. We get that in Owner's Share. As much as I love this book it was very hard to get through toward the end. Lowell handled it graciously though. You did a beautiful job on this book and the entire series as a whole, Nathan! Thank you.

I had a bad feeling at the direction I thought the story was taking at the beginning of the book. I was right about the bad feeling, but wrong about all of the reasons I thought that Ishmael was damning himself. Instead, I had a heart-wrenching and heart-felt wrap-up of the series. Nothing quite happened the way that I anticipated and two events near the end made me gasp with shivers up my spine. Hell, the thing that he does at the very end still moves me. Fantastic job!

A bittersweet ending to the Share series. Bitter because it is an ending to an excellent set of novels (as well as due to some plot elements I'm not at liberty to discuss, as per Article 37). But sweet, at the same time, because we've seen Ishmael Wang grow from an 18-year old whiz kid into a man who has built a life for himself in the cold of the deep dark, one fully different from the kid he was but yet fully recognizable.

I was a little worried about this entry in the series at first, because the plot seemed like the kind you would find in a sitcom spin-off series: Ish gets his own ship and company, and has to take on a new crew-member who needs to fulfill a year in space to fulfill the terms of her father's will and inherit a shipping fortune.

The entire thing, though, is handled with enough skill and graceful crafting that once the story's started, you don't second-guess it, and get dragged into the narrative. It's a fitting ending, one that brings us full-circle to both the beginning of the entire series and the second half of the series that was started in Double Share, while still maintaining its own narrative and emotional arc separate from the series on the whole.