Book Review – The Family Trade
Author: Charles Stross
Publisher: Tor
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 2005
ust as she’s fired from her job, fumbling about for freelance reporting assignments to meet her bills, Miriam Beckstein discovers a secret about her birth family — they are dimension-hopping merchants who traffic in rare commodities between our own world and their native one, an underdeveloped medieval society that is roughly descended from Viking settlers in North America. Her mother was assassinated during a civil war and fled to our world, where she died, leaving the small baby Helge to be adopted by a nice Jewish family — hence, Miriam Beckstein.
Miriam’s reappearance upsets the balance of power among her family, as she is now the inheritor of a large shareholder percentage of the Clan, as the family business is known. She finds herself balanced between this world and that, having to learn an entire new culture while dealing with the fact that in her native world cut-throat business has a literal meaning.
In this first book of the Merchant Princes, Charles Stross introduces his setting and swiftly gets the reader into the political and economic turmoil involved. Though at times elements of the dialogue get bogged down with discussions of how the business works, Stross tends to mix this with enough humor and realism that the reader keeps getting pulled back into the story. The book ends with several cliffhangers to be expanded upon in the subsequent novels, wherein the reader expects to find Miriam continuing to maneuver among the diverse familial factions while also using her clout to reform the Clan into a more enlightened, progressive business enterprise. And, to be sure, there will still be someone trying to kill her.
About Azjones: 
Recent Comments