Rating :4.5⭐️
Wave Rider is the fifth book the Verdant String series but unlike other series, these stories are written as standalone novels and can be read separately from each other.
The Verdant String are a group of green life bearing planets from 5 solar systems that make up the Verdant String Coalition. So the stories feature various species and worlds different from each other.
I picked up Wave Rider because I really liked the premise of the book. An isolated woman scientist on an icy planet, a pod of water beings that sounds similar to whales, and a mysterious plot unfolding around her.
There’s also an indigenous peoples who are wave riders who collect a substance similar to baleen and a matriarchal society.
So many interesting elements here that I found myself wishing that the author had explored some of these in even more detail. Just so many great ideas and storylines here and not enough page time for them all.
Anna and Cal, the team and even the relationships forming with the leviathan pods deserve a sequel.
I’m so invested in this story and characters that I want to see more of them.
A new find and series by this author. Recommended!
Cover Design: Creative Paramita
Verdant String series:
Each book in the series can be read as a standalone:
Interference & Insurgency Box Set
Breakaway
Breakeven
Trailblazer
High Flyer
Wave Rider
Peace Maker
Buy link
Blurb
Isolated . . . Verdant String scientist, Anja Farucci, is frightened. Her calls for help from her remote coastal research station on the moon planet Fynian have been going unanswered, and strange things are happening with the leviathan pod she’s studying. Out of options, she sets out on the dangerous three-day journey to Rinc, the moon’s only city.
Stranded . . . Cal is a wave rider, and if anyone understands leviathans, it’s him, but when Kada, a young leviathan, grabs his boat and strands him on the southern peninsula, Cal is at a loss to understand what is going on.
Thrown together . . . When Cal and Anja cross paths, they discover Anja’s communications have been deliberately sabotaged. Someone doesn’t want anyone coming or going from the southern peninsula. When the people involved start hurting leviathans, though, neither Cal nor Anja can let it go.
What they don’t know, as they get deeper and deeper into the mystery, is that the secret they discover in the cold waters of Fynian’s ocean will change them forever.
WAVE RIDER is the fifth book set in the world of the Verdant String. Like the other books in the series, it can be read as a standalone novel.
The planets of the Verdant String, the green, fecund sources of life spanning five solar systems, comprise the Verdant String Coalition. This is the setting for the science fiction romance series from award-winning novelist Michelle Diener. While the people of the Verdant String know they have a common ancestor, a group of explorers who colonized the planets at the same time thousands of years ago, the mysteries of who they were, and where they came from, persist.
Each book in the series can be read as a standalone:
Interference & Insurgency Box Set
Breakaway
Breakeven
Trailblazer
High Flyer
Wave Rider
Peace Maker
Eclipse
Publication date
July 11, 2021
Language
English
Print length
284 pages
Book 5 of 8
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 