Countess by Suzan Palumbo
Captain Virika Sameroo pulled herself up by the proverbial bootstraps to achieve the military prestige that opens the book. She’s everyone’s favorite immigrant-rags-to-semi-riches story, being a “model” of her people there in Invicta, the capital city of the Æcerbot Empire. Her father had promised Virika and her mother a better life when they left everything they had ever known to move to the outskirts of Invicta. She survived the racist micro- and macro-aggressions of the merchant fleet academy and would come to serve in the military of the Æcerbot Empire, protecting the Empire’s interests against the pirates that would strip everything they could from merchant ships.
The captain of the ship she was on, her mentor, fell ill before the start of the book. She was promoted to captain and brought the ill captain, the crew, and the ship back to Invicta immediately to get medical aid. She barely gets to visit her lover and her mother before she is violently arrested, accused of heinous crimes that she insists she did not commit. After an unfair meeting of a five-member tribunal, she is taken to the prison planet where all there is is a prison known as “The Pit” and the people who work at the prison. It is the place where prisoners are left to be forgotten and die.
If you are familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, then you know that this is not where the story ends. The author does a phenomenal job of making Virika’s despair so incredibly palpable and it gets bleak, to put it lightly. The author does not leave us to wallow in “The Pit,” and it had been a while since I had actively cheered for a character until I started reading about Virika, her relatable climb from the lower class to a higher class that has no interest in her or her people, and her subsequent thirst for vengeance with a hefty side of rebellion.
