In today’s episode, Cadet Troi’s freshman year is off to a rough start, and if it isn’t one thing, it’s her mother. But once she signs up for a major pass/fail test early, she’s in for a slip of latinum, in for a bar. Can Deanna overcome her reputation of privilege? How quickly does Lwaxana go through valets? And is the galaxy ready for Kirk 2.0? All this and more in Breakaway, the book that throws an unexpected punctuation curve.

Breakaway
Authors: Bobbi J.G. Weiss, David Cody Weiss
Pages: 113
Published: April 1997
Timeline: Nine years before “Encounter at Farpoint”
Prerequisites: Having an understanding of the relationship between Deanna and Lwaxana going in makes it a lot richer, but it isn’t a requirement

Deanna Troi’s first year at Starfleet Academy is shaping up to be a rocky one. Her mother is tentatively allowing her to enroll, on the condition that she takes the command track (anything else being unworthy of her royal Betazoid breeding, of course). She’s having a hard time building up her mental shields, this being her first time around a population that doesn’t lock its thoughts down tight. And she isn’t the greatest at socializing. She manages to make one friend, her Ichthyan roommate Twil d-ch-Ka, whom she nicknames “Auburn” after her reddish-brown hair. When Deanna wonders why people aren’t cottoning to her, Auburn, like the best sort of friend, lays it out straight: she comes from a privileged background, her beauty intimidates people, she looks angry when she’s trying to raise her shields, and she’s always contradicting people. (This is where Owen Wilson would tell Deanna, “Listen to your friend Auburn. She’s a cool chick. She’s trying to help you out.”)

Deanna struggles to refute accusations that her privilege, connections, and empathic abilities give her unfair advantages, and what little sputtering defense she can cobble together gets almost immediately chopped off at the knees by Lwaxana when she finagles a teaching job in one of Deanna’s classes. It doesn’t take a Betazoid’s powers to sense that Deanna is stressed out and has no friends, and so, rolling the easy insight check, Lt. Cmdr. Thaddeus Gold puts her in a study group, which consists of Auburn; Alex Renny, one of the cadets levying the aforementioned accusations against her; Vandin ua Xadmy Sidk, a hopeless chauvinist from Xybaka VI who has a mix of Kirk’s leadership drive and Shatner’s ego; and Tronnald First-House, a Zakdorn medic whose thirst for adventure is matched only by his trepidation about it.

If Lwaxana crosses a line when she has dinner wheeled into Deanna’s study group and demands an apology for walking out of her class, then she leaves it behind at warp ten when she reveals that what little strength Deanna has succeeded in adding to her mental shields has actually been her doing, crushing the speck of confidence she had managed to gain. Desperate for some way to prove she can make it on her own, she applies for an early attempt at the Borocco-Kai scenario, a pass/fail test of mettle that most cadets choose to take closer to the end of their freshman year. But with hardly any Academy book-learnin’ under her belt and only the barest shred of empathic power, is she doing the right thing?

Each chapter alternates between Deanna’s acclimation and the Borocco-Kai simulation, which isn’t strictly necessary for the book to do probably, but does prevent the sort of thing we’ve seen in some other books where the first half has a lot of really solid character work and then the rest is padded out with boilerplate action in a misbegotten assumption that not having any will cause addled minds to wander. Naturally, I found the non-sim parts more interesting, though it is worth noting how well fleshed-out Deanna’s study mates are in just over a hundred pages and how their personalities manifest in the simulation (for better and worse). There’s also not really any reason for the Borocco-Kai to be this big career-ending hurdle other than to give some stakes to Deanna’s arc, though one cadet does fail it, and the lack of punches pulled in their dismissal is respectable.

The other Starfleet Academy book Breakaway most closely resembles is Starfall, which puts it in pretty good company, I think. As Picard grappled with his family (sometimes physically), so must Deanna contend with her mother. Lwaxana is usually at least mildly annoying even in the best of times, but here she’s a flat-out monster. Not all Deanna/Lwaxana stories deal with how narcissistic the latter can be, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve often found myself surprised by how people have passed through my life who have or had at least one pathologically narcissistic parent. And even though Lwaxana’s motive is pretty predictable if you’re paying attention, her admission of it is still movingly rendered. Their friction definitely made for the most compelling parts of the story. The Starfleet Academy novels have been no stranger to conflicts that are surprisingly mature for the demographics they tend to aim for, and Breakaway continues ably in that tradition.

Breakaway is the first of three YA Trek novels by the Weisses, who will also turn in the last one we ever review, April 1998’s Deceptions. We’ve had some eclectic authors in the past, but I’m not sure if anyone will ever steal the crown from these two. They take great pride in their wide range of jobs, and frankly, they should. A lot of them are the sorts of things you don’t often immediately think of as being written, as such—more sort of, like, somehow manifested fully formed onto big-box store shelves—but somebody has to write those things, and they’re that “somebody.” Some of their non-book jobs include things like audio scripts, video game scenarios, activity pages in magazines, trading cards, various bits of copy on product packaging, and even gag strips for Donald Duck orange juice cartons. Talk about a journeyman career! But none of it seems to have dulled their literary blade. Breakaway is an enjoyable one, definitely in the upper half of the Academy books so far.

MVP & LVP

• The MVP of this book is Auburn. She is completely unflappable—clamps down on interpersonal conflicts quickly and decisively, stays cool as a cucumber in stressful situations, and never takes her eyes off her dream of command for even a second. It doesn’t take much convincing at all to believe she’ll actually be sitting in the captain’s chair one day. I would say I’d like to see a story with her as the main character, but it seems like it’d be difficult to conjure up a conflict she’d actually be reasonably challenged by.
• Our LVP this time is Alex Renny. Renny complains that Deanna’s got a lot going for her that other cadets don’t, but there’s nothing outstanding about him that would make you think he’d be getting better opportunities if Deanna wasn’t around. Basically the only thing we ever learn about him is that he’s from Oregon, which he says like it’s supposed to mean something. Basically, he’s no different than any other mediocre white dude who has fallen into the trap of assuming he’s way more special than he actually is.

Stray Bits

• Interesting to see an author go with hyphens for an alien’s name (Auburn’s) over the usual superfluous apostrophes. Rarer, yet also more logical.
• Lwaxana’s trusty silent valet is named “Xelo” here, for some reason? There’s nothing in the text distinguishing him and Mr. Homn, and he even looks like Mr. Homn in Todd Cameron Hamilton’s artwork. Maybe they are two different people from the same species, a species that just so happens to be really good at being butlers. Maybe Xelo slipped up at some point though, and so Lwaxana fired him and hired Homn. We’ll never know for sure. (EDIT: Yes, we will, I just apparently can’t be bothered to run a quick Memory Alpha check.)
• “The humanoid Orions weren’t tall, nor were they particularly massive. But there was a sense of solidity about them which [sic] suggested that nothing short of a Brikarian wrestler could push them off-balance.” — Nice name drop of a species created by Peter David, who we’ll be seeing again in our very next review. And bonus, it’s now a canon one too! (p. 27)
• “…I didn’t come all the way from Betazed to watch you throw your career away.” ¶ “You didn’t come all the way from Betazed to watch me succeed at it, either.” Oof. Choice burn. Point: Deanna. (p. 78)

Final Assessment

Excellent. In Breakaway, Deanna Troi gets her own Starfall, a book that’s as much about carving out your own path and transcending your parents’ expectations for you as it is about any standard-issue action plot. The major characters are all perfectly realized, no small feat given how little time and space authors of these books have to work with. And even though it might seem a little cutesy to bounce back and forth between the simulation and the lead-up to it, it actually ends up helping things stay fresh throughout. Another YA winner.

NEXT TIME: Something’s in the water in Wrath of the Prophets