The Main character Dace is a woman who can't seem to stay out of trouble. My trouble with her is she just accepts the things that happen far too easily. If I were attacked by an alien race of lizards because of what my copilot, who I barely know did to them I would try to tear him apart every chance I got, but she just accepts it and goes on. Even when that pilot says to forget it and run away from it Dace is the one who says they need to go fine the eggstone. I would have agreed and then thrown him of my shop. She does things without enough reason to do them and then refuses to do the things that would benefit her without a good reason for the reader to get behind her. She was far to quick to decide that someone she knew for all of a half an hour was suddenly like the sister she never had and was going to buy a ship with. Lowell, who dogged her the entire book to get her to sign up with him suddenly doesn't need her at the end to things just tie up so nicely is ridiculous.
The title of the book had very little to do with the overall story so I think it was a bad choice. The story itself did not have a central theme or purpose so there was not a lot of reasons the keep reading.
There were too many setups that were not paid off. To mush history from an evidently previous story that was not told here that may have made things make more sense.
Now all this does not mean the writer can't write. On the contrary, he is a very good writer. He kept the story going in a relatively straight line keeping things and people strait. His action scenes are great.
When I was learning to write one of my teacher told me that the story is only as good and the antagonist is bad and the protagonist is true. There just wasn't any real bad guy in the story. The bad guy creates the theme. I hope the next story has a great bad guy because I would really like to read it.