Jethri Gobelyn is a space-born Terran assistant trader on his family’s ship, Gobelyn’s Market, a life he loves despite the loss of his father and his mother’s growing hostility. Most of Jethri’s life is spent on ship, with his planet side time mercifully limited to off-loading and procuring items for trade.
With Gobelyn’s Market set to be sidelined for at least a standard year for refit, Captain Iza Gobelyn, Jethri’s mother, has contracted him to a mining vessel. Distraught over his circumstances, he convinces his mother to allow him to find another ship.
An inexperienced investment, and the negative consequences that ensue, find Jethri apprenticed to a Liaden Master Trader, a dream assignment that soon takes a turn as he discovers he will have to spend a great deal of his apprenticeship in the wide open spaces of a Liaden home world.
Balance of Trade is the third novel in the Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Liaden Universe series. It is set 200 years before the events that have been the focal point of the bulk of the series. The fascinating Liaden and Terran cultures that I have enjoyed in the handful of novels and short stories that I have read are on display here, woven into the story as skillfully as I have come to expect from this husband-wife writing team. But the greatest pleasure of these space operas is the interplay of the characters, and the attachments one makes with them as the story unfolds.
