Rating: 3⭐️
Have you ever read a book and been absolutely irritated by an author’s decision to make their main character an absolute idiot? Mostly because of the time that you spent trying to make sense of the narrative and that character before giving up?
No it wasn’t a comedy. It was a science fiction story. With a romantic plot included.
A story made up of cardboard characters, a MFC who’s so poorly written that I found her not just ludicrously incompetent but whose actions just compromised what her character’s ability, history, and experience says she was.
Plus a MMC so largely physically cartoonish that his face has a “butt chin” (written term in the book) and a smile so white that you might expect that star twinkle when you see that flash of white teeth. He’s made so “beautiful” that he’s all she thinks about, even on a mission with a deadline that is high stakes and deadly to crew on an undercover planet.
Can I say SMH?
This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t have some interesting features or intriguing elements, because it does. Once again there’s a world divided into powerful Families, the top Five, the Ten Families next fighting for their own power and political interests, then the other Twenty families. And so on.
How that works or came about isn’t clear. That they are heavily modified genetically is. Or the most powerful are, and society isn’t a benign place.
Other interesting elements are secondary characters like Etzel, a crew member who’s also a former assassin cult member. More Etzel.
But instead we get a Capt who just acts as though she’s the newbie on the crew and it’s her first encounter and mission.
Does she knowingly eat food that she thinks is suspicious when in a hostile environment/encampment? Yes, and is drugged and poisoned. Threatening her crew, mission, and the other person there.
On a hostile planet and mission where they have actively engaged with enemies, has she as the Captain of her ship set adequate measures to protect her ship and crew from attack or invasion? No.
We’re not even at 50 percent of the story. How does a author present such a totally inadequate main woman character, so amazingly stupid in her choices and decisions, utterly hormonal that she appears to be thinking with her uterus 90 percent of the time, and with the tendency to flare up in anger like a toddler that I had to double check that a woman actually wrote this. Even a teenager is more credible these days.
This is a book where I felt myself losing brain cells the further I read. Passage after passage of just events that made my mind hurt. Dialogue that considering the status of their respective missions, the situations that they had maneuvered themselves into (honestly ,you rescued someone who didn’t want to be rescued and then don’t secure them? SMH), endlessly discussing things that have no relevance to the dire situation the crew and danger they are in.
Others were rating this story highly. I don’t understand why. Nothing made sense to me about it. Not the plot or characters.
No I’m not reading the sequel.
If you are interested, read it. Tell me your thoughts.
Buy link
Blurb
The captain of a ragtag mercenary ship is given an offer she can’t refuse by the ruthless head of an intergalactic noble family. The only catch? She’ll have to team up with his son–an upsettingly competent hardbody with his own agenda–to get her reward.
She’s got a ramshackle spaceship, a misfit crew, and a big problem with its sexy newest member…
Temperance Reed, banished from the wealthy and dangerous Fifteen Families, just wants to keep her crew together after their feckless captain ran off with the intern. But she’s drowning in debt and revolutionary new engine technology is about to make her beloved ship obsolete.
Enter Arcadio Escajeda. Second child of the terrifying Escajeda Family, he’s the thorn in Temper’s side as they’re sent off on a scouting mission on the backwater desert planet of Herschel 2. They throw sparks every time they meet but Temper’s suspicions of his ulterior motives only serve to fuel the flames between them.
Despite volcanic eruptions, secret cultists, and deadly galactic fighters, the greatest threat on this mission may be to Temper’s heart.
Bramble
Publication date
November 14, 2023
Language
English
Print length
310 pages
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 