Synopsis:
Rohan doesn’t want to be famous, to be rich, or to rule over the galaxy with an iron fist. All he wants is a peaceful life towing ships, a decent cup of coffee, and time to pursue the woman of his dreams.
First he’ll have to tame or destroy a self-centered god, a sector-spanning evil empire, and a race of slumbering moon-sized vampiric cephalopods.
That will require new allies by his side and new tricks up the sleeves of his purple and yellow jumpsuit.
Allies like the il’Zkin, cat people who can’t leave their homeworld, or the kaiju of Toth 3, monsters he can’t control. Tricks like the mystical technique given to him by Spiral, his mentor, that seems completely incompatible with the Hybrid rage that has been his greatest strength.
When his friend Wei Li receives visitors from her own mysterious past, Rohan realizes they might hold the keys to helping him with several of those problems.
Those visitors seem to have other ideas.
Review:
I decided to bump this book up on my TBR after reading several others that were pretty dark and/or tense because I needed some humor in my life. I knew this one would deliver, and it certainly didn’t disappoint on that front. Rohan’s jokes, Wei Li’s sarcasm, and Katya’s feline antics (just to mention a few characters) are a huge part of why I love the Hybrid Helix series. While there are high stakes and galactic-level problems to solve in each story too, the humor is what keeps me coming back for more.
Suppression of Powers shows us a slightly different side of the series’ main character, Rohan. He still gets into just as many fights, and he’s still doing his best to protect those he cares about, but he goes about it in a different way. Mastering Spiral’s technique is impossible when Rohan gets angry or afraid, but he believes he needs to learn it if he wants to succeed in saving the galaxy from the latest big threat. And that means he gets beat up. A lot. Probably more than any other book in the series so far.
While I understand Rohan’s desire to change his methods, I was getting a little impatient with him after a while. He needed to figure things out, yes, but there’s only so much of the main character being repeatedly trounced by people I know he can win against that I can take. That element of the story did get better before the end, though.
Beyond Rohan, we also get to learn more about Wei Li and Tamaralinth in this book. Both women are powerful in their own ways, but even more so than I could have anticipated (I really liked both of their stories!) I also enjoyed the addition of Terry, Rohan’s sort-of pet kaiju/pterosaur.
Suppression of Powers is the beginning of the second “sub-series” within the Hybrid Helix, and there is quite a bit of set up for things that will inevitably happen later. I’m excited to see where the series will go from here.
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