Completed
8/28/2018, Reviewed 8/28/2018
2 stars
I didn’t
care much for this novel. It had a lot
of interesting ideas, such as physical disability, gender issues, genocide, and
alternate universes, but it didn’t seem to come together into a satisfactory
whole. Perhaps the most interesting
thing about it is that the majority of characters are female, with a token male
here and there, the opposite of what you find in most science fiction
novels. So it passes the Bechdel test in
that there are women who have a conversation that’s not about men. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to raise this
above the level of mediocre.
Alana is a
sky surgeon (read starship engineer) who works in a shop repairing ships, but
has never been in space. She has an autoimmune
disease that contracts her muscles, causing terrific pain. The disease can be treated, but the meds are
expensive, and being a sky surgeon doesn’t pay well. One day, a starship arrives looking for Alana’s
“spirit guide” sister, Nova. With Nova
on vacation, Alana decides to stow away on the ship, hoping to parlay
information on Nova’s location into a permanent job on the ship. The plan works, sort of.
The mission and
the crew of the ship is anything but ordinary.
There’s the engineer who thinks he’s a wolf, the pilot who flickers in
and out of existence, and the captain who is having an affair with the medical
officer. Alana falls for the captain as
well. But all this has to wait, because
the crew is blamed for the destruction of a planet, Alana is running out of
meds, Nova is not cooperating, and the pilot will soon blink completely out of
existence unless they can get to an alternate universe.
So yeah,
lots of interesting stuff. However, no
matter what strange things were going on, the story kept reverting to Alana as
she obsessed and tortured herself over falling for the captain of the
starship. It was pretty normal obsession
initially, especially since it conflicted with her first true love, being a sky
surgeon. She fell in love with the ship
as well as with its captain. The book is
told in first person Alana, so the whole middle of the book was sitting in her
head while she kicked herself for her feelings.
It got tedious quickly.
In general,
the relationships all seemed pretty bizarre.
There were a lot of secrets and miscommunication which made the
relationships seem dysfunctional. I’m
not so sure they weren’t. I didn’t mind
the polyamory, I minded how nobody would talk about it. In fact, nothing about the relationships was
clarified until the end. I would have
rather seen the relationships clear up early and let the science fiction part
of the story carry the novel to the end.
Instead, the science fiction part of the story gets pushed back until
nearly the end. By that time, I didn’t
care much about it anymore, I just wanted the book to be finished.
I give this
book two stars out of five. It was a
convoluted mess. I’m saddened by this
score, because I always want books with LGBTQ content to be good. Of course, just because there’s a lesbian
relationship in the story doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good book. I just want it to be.
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