480 pp. September 9, 2025, Solaris. SF.
Page Found is making do. Having woken up with memory loss on some random station in deep space, there isn’t much else she can do. When her easy mark turns the tables on her and kidnaps her for a job—a heist!—it all sounds too good to be real (something Page thinks right from the start), and it kind of is—or is it?
Most of this novel is about Page’s journey to freedom and her budding friendship with Maelle. There’s a lot about Page still trying to work out who she is—the central mystery of the novel—as she, Zhak and Maelle travel to where the heist will happen, with only occasional spurts of action (most of which are fun). Page’s interiority, while interesting at first, does rather go on and on (as one would expect since she’s stuck on a long-ish journey through space); I did put this down for a while because it dragged before it found its feet again.
But it is a novel with heart. Page is cute and you have to feel for her: She has nothing in the world (or universe really), not even her real name. She’s lucky to find Maelle, who turns out to be a decent sort, and who’s on a quest of her own. Cleverly interspersed throughout and guiding readers along in a bit of dramatic irony is the fascinating and tantalising story of two girls from a far-off planet; this part is very well done, and I found it far more gripping than the bits set in Page’s present—in fact, they’re from where the novel derives its heft. It’s not cool to talk about the novel that wasn’t, but in some ways I wish we’d spent more time in that other world; Page’s present is far less interesting.
But a good read. Thanks to Solaris for an early DRC.
Ps. I kept calling Page “Page Not Found” in my head, as one would.
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Harare Review of Books 
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