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bisonprints's review
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Confinement and Violence
Minor: Cursing
alisonalisonalison's review
4.0
This was fun and entertaining. I really liked it. An adventurous academic goes exploring on another planet and finds both love and the answers to a great galactic mystery and it's great fun. Dr. London Wells is an Indiana Jones-style linguistics professor who is an expert on ancient languages and travels to other planets for research. He's also a bit prickly and charmingly eccentric and pretty entertaining to run around with. There's bad guys and lively action scenes and a budding background romance and mysterious alien technology and I found it all very entertaining. The world-building is great and there's a lot going on in this story, and while it's action-packed, it also has some slow moments. This is a fun queer sci-fi adventure story with a likeable, smart hero. I look forward to the sequel.
aprillen's review
DNF. The premise seemed interesting, but I got too annoyed with the protagonist.
jpjackson's review
5.0
Brilliant read! Loved it. Will definitely pick up another book by this author.
kjcharles's review
I enjoyed this space adventure with Indiana Jones type academic (preternaturally gifted archaeolinguist, if that's a thing) exploring a Lost Planet and meeting alien technology and bad guys on the way. Some really exciting action sequences, vivid writing, and a nice nerd-action hero with a slow burn romance.
Not perfect, though what is. It spent a long time getting started, the romance was so very slow burn and back-end loaded that I'm not really sure it qualifies as romance genre (which is fine, only I was expecting a romance, possibly I misread), and I feel the author needed to kill a few darlings when it came to the lavish worldbuilding. I hope the author gets a better structural editor next time because there's tons of talent and great storytelling and clear writing here, and it really just needed work on the pacing/plot rhythms to make it a much more satisfying whole. (The fact that I am itching for a red pen is an endorsement rather than otherwise. I don't have any urge to edit books I didn't like.)
Not perfect, though what is. It spent a long time getting started, the romance was so very slow burn and back-end loaded that I'm not really sure it qualifies as romance genre (which is fine, only I was expecting a romance, possibly I misread), and I feel the author needed to kill a few darlings when it came to the lavish worldbuilding. I hope the author gets a better structural editor next time because there's tons of talent and great storytelling and clear writing here, and it really just needed work on the pacing/plot rhythms to make it a much more satisfying whole. (The fact that I am itching for a red pen is an endorsement rather than otherwise. I don't have any urge to edit books I didn't like.)
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