Review: The First Sister

The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first in a trilogy that I saw recommended on r/RedRising plays out more like The Expanse and The Handmaid's Tale collaborated and presented a multilayered, action-packed thriller with a hyper-diverse cast of characters. The title character is one of three major POV's, stripped of her name and voice and forced to live as a "comfort woman" to various interplanetary military commanders. Interestingly, it's not as patriarchal as you might think - it's heavily rooted in a matriarchal religion, and First Sister is assigned, early on, to a new commander who presents much more female. My guess is that Lewis, being nonbinary, wrote this in an effort to understand a new perspective on feminity in a world that places the wrong kind of value on it.

Alternating between First Sister's chapters out in the Belt are Lito, a disgraced soldier from Venus, and his missing lover Hiro, whose chapters are presented as interlude transcripts of the audio recordings they're trying to get back to Lito by any means necessary.

It's an interesting future civilization where, while we're not on Earth anymore (though there are some unofficial inhabitants on Earth's now two moons, Selene and Diane), a lot of aspects of current Earth cultures have persisted. English, Spanish, and Chinese are the official languages, and Lito and Hiro keep their respective Hispanic and Japanese cultures alive. The social divisions between characters are less about current understanding of race and gender and more about planet of origin, with Mercury and Venus warring with Mars and the Belt.

Some Japanese readers might take issue with a few depictions for Hiro and their family, particularly the fact that the Akira family runs a massive corporate empire - it toes the line of cyberpunk stereotype, especially since there's much more Chinese influence in this society than Japanese, which makes me wonder if perhaps Lewis wrote Hiro and their family as Japanese to avoid excessive comparisons to the Mao family and corporation in The Expanse. But to their credit, Lewis did hire at least one Japanese sensitivity reader, and there's a key moment where Hiro calls out another character as racist for a plan that relies on non-Asians failing to tell the difference between two Japanese people.

I've already got the remaining two books from two different libraries, so I'll be ready to read and review both of them very soon...

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