My daughter and I really enjoyed this mixed sci-fi / fantasy story. The writing style feels slightly older, which was a nice change from the rapid-fire exchange of dialogue in many MG / YA books. Instead, there's pages of narrative and description with little external dialogue, and lots of internal dialogue from the main character's POV, 13-year-old Min, but part of that is due to her "disguised" role in the story.
Min is from a family of "foxes," or shape shifters, and have excellent hearing and sense of smell. Unfortunately, they abused those traits when they first settled the planet Jinju and lured colonists to their deaths, so now the colonists fear them and Min's family hides their "fox" traits.
So when a government representative arrives at their door, claiming her oldest brother, Jun, has deserted from the Space Force and brought shame to the family, Min panics. She takes the form of a table and spills hot tea on him and knocks him out.
Upset she's outed her family's foxness and put them in danger, Min runs away to find Jun, whom she desperately hopes is still alive. She first turns to an Aunt, a black sheep of the family who blatantly uses her fox qualities for monetary gain and manages a brothel and gambling house. Min is briefly trapped but she escapes and talks her way onto a losing gambler's ship, the Red Azalea.
But mercenaries looking for the legendary Dragon Pearl try to take the Red Azalea in a battle. The Space Force and Captain of the Pale Lightning respond to the Azalea's distress call and save the ship and her pilot, but with losses -- a cadet, Jang, is killed.
Min survives the battle and sees a the perfect opportunity to get into the Space Force and figure out what happened to her brother. Jang's ghost allows her to take his form and place on the Pale Lightning if she'll also promise to figure out who killed him and why.
From that point forward, it's a race to figure out what happened to Jun, who endangered him and why, and find and release his ghost -- and all the ghosts -- on the Fourth Planet.
A fun read!
