Jacey Bedford's Journal

There's a lot to like about this book, but also things that nagged at me while I was reading it. The good things first. The worldbuilding is excellent, or perhaps that should be galaxy-building because a lot of this is set in deep space. It tackles the human problem of relativity - a short trip, subjective time, means that years have passed when the ship returns to its point of origin. Anyone taking that trip will return to find family and friends have aged and possibly died. The freighter, The Hajj, is a family ship, old and cranky, it works, for now, but it runs on tech left over from a previous era, and it could fall apart at any time. It's a Sadiq family ship. The Sadiqs use relative time to order a bride for Adem, maintenance engineer, amateur musician, and the captain's son. She's not even conceived when they leave, and she's a young woman by the time they return. Hisako's parents take a deal that allows them to escape poverty, move out of the bad part of town, and have a child in the full knowledge that when she grows up she's contracted to marry Adem and go into space. The requirement is that with a little gene splice Hisako will become a near genius and she'll be required to study an obscure branch of physics, so that she'll fill a gap in skills on board ship. Hisako doesn't learn of her impending marriage until she's in her teens and she's not happy, but a contract is a contract. She doesn't know that the Captain has a plan which involves retrofitting old tech with a chance of restoring faster than light travel.