Packet Trade

Devi Jones' Locker #1

by Darusha Wehm

Tropical adventures. A rag-tag sailing crew. Running off-grid data servers? Sounds legit. Devi Jones is a year away from graduating with a Computer Science degree and it's internship time. But usually the ship part isn’t quite so literal. She gets hired by Really Remote Desktop, a cloud data storage company that keeps their servers in odd places, like the bilge of a hundred-foot sailboat.  How can a homebody like Devi step on to a boat with six strangers and sail away from everything she has ever known? All while trying to do her best at her first real job? Being in a tropical paradise helps — but only until things start to go wrong.

150 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2016

About the author

Darusha writes science fiction and speculative poetry as M. Darusha Wehm and mainstream poetry and fiction as Darusha Wehm. Science fiction books include: Beautiful Red, Children of Arkadia and the Andersson Dexter cyberpunk detective series. Mainstream books include the Devi Jones' Locker Young Adult series and The Home for Wayward Parrots (forthcoming from NeWest Press).

Darusha’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in many venues, including Arsenika, Nature, Escape Pod, and several anthologies.

Darusha is originally from Canada but currently lives in Wellington, New Zealand after spending the past several years sailing the Pacific. For more information, visit http://darusha.ca.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packet Trade is light fun. The story moves along quickly and the characters are interesting. Having lived the life of a blue water cruiser, as my tribe of long distance sailors call themselves, I can vouch for the authenticity of the description of the lifestyle. If you want a fun book about being a sailor, with a little high-tech thrown in, then Packet Trade is for you.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I absolutely love the author's prior works, and give her props for stretching into a new genre, this one fell flat for me. I enjoyed the picture it painted of life at sea, but the lack of crisis left it feeling more like a travel log than a novel.

A refreshing light read, but I guess I need more crunch.