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A review by marilynw
Refractions by M.V. Melcer
4.0
Refractions by M V Melcer
Narrated by Patricia Rodriguez
It's in the future and Earth is a mess. But there is Bethesda – humanity's first extra-solar colony and the hope of developing others like it. Except that the colony has stopped communicating with Earth. So a ship has been sent to Bethesda and it'll take thirty five years to get there and then thirty five more years to get back home. What kind of people would volunteer for such a mission, a mission that will mean never seeing their loved ones and friends again, a mission that means the volunteers come home to a world that is seventy years plus further along while the volunteers have been in stasis most of those years?
The story is mostly in the "future" present day although it also goes back to before Nathalie Hart, a Canadian space pilot, volunteers for the trip to check out what has happened at Bethesda. Imagine her surprise when she is not only accepted for the trip but made second in command, a job for which she is in no way qualified. She's not been trained for the job but also she understandably has PTSD from the latest events on Earth, events that she feels she is responsible for, events that killed so many.
Ha, when things go very lopsided on the ship and Nathalie ends up in charge, and then things go even more lopsided, seeing Nathalie crumbled on her floor having what seems like teenage rebellious hissy fits put fear in my heart, too, that she could not do the job. Nathalie has no confidence in herself. She just wants to sulk in her cabin and have everyone stop depending on her. But Nathalie pulls herself together, her immense guilt is something that pushes her to pull herself up by her bootstraps and at least pretend she can do the job, pretend she can lead a diverse team that is made up of hostile parties who could turn on each other in an instant.
Nathalie wins me over in the end. So do many other characters who I wasn't fond of at first. When the going gets tough, when the going gets impossible, maybe people can pull together, not all of them, but some of them. Maybe there is hope for humanity even though some super powerful somebodies would like to take everything away from anyone but the super powerful few. Patricia Rodriguez does a really good job with the narration of this space opera. There are so many characters, with various accents, and foreign words and her narration even helped me to keep track of the characters since she gives them distinctive voices.
Pub November 16, 2023
Thank you to Dreamscape Select, Storm Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC.
Narrated by Patricia Rodriguez
It's in the future and Earth is a mess. But there is Bethesda – humanity's first extra-solar colony and the hope of developing others like it. Except that the colony has stopped communicating with Earth. So a ship has been sent to Bethesda and it'll take thirty five years to get there and then thirty five more years to get back home. What kind of people would volunteer for such a mission, a mission that will mean never seeing their loved ones and friends again, a mission that means the volunteers come home to a world that is seventy years plus further along while the volunteers have been in stasis most of those years?
The story is mostly in the "future" present day although it also goes back to before Nathalie Hart, a Canadian space pilot, volunteers for the trip to check out what has happened at Bethesda. Imagine her surprise when she is not only accepted for the trip but made second in command, a job for which she is in no way qualified. She's not been trained for the job but also she understandably has PTSD from the latest events on Earth, events that she feels she is responsible for, events that killed so many.
Ha, when things go very lopsided on the ship and Nathalie ends up in charge, and then things go even more lopsided, seeing Nathalie crumbled on her floor having what seems like teenage rebellious hissy fits put fear in my heart, too, that she could not do the job. Nathalie has no confidence in herself. She just wants to sulk in her cabin and have everyone stop depending on her. But Nathalie pulls herself together, her immense guilt is something that pushes her to pull herself up by her bootstraps and at least pretend she can do the job, pretend she can lead a diverse team that is made up of hostile parties who could turn on each other in an instant.
Nathalie wins me over in the end. So do many other characters who I wasn't fond of at first. When the going gets tough, when the going gets impossible, maybe people can pull together, not all of them, but some of them. Maybe there is hope for humanity even though some super powerful somebodies would like to take everything away from anyone but the super powerful few. Patricia Rodriguez does a really good job with the narration of this space opera. There are so many characters, with various accents, and foreign words and her narration even helped me to keep track of the characters since she gives them distinctive voices.
Pub November 16, 2023
Thank you to Dreamscape Select, Storm Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC.