The Wrong Stars is an entertaining and accessible sci fi opera/romp featuring imaginative aliens, cyborgs, pirates, and space battles. The pace is quick and the story never lags or gets lost in the technology. But we also have a female lead written exactly like a male character so the shallow instalust is made more acceptable. It perhaps ends a bit too quickly at the end with too much happening but there are nice twists and turns along the way to make for an enjoyable read.
Although Captain Callie Machedo works for the system’s authorities, she also employs crew members who are highly competent but also very unusual. It’s given her a bit of a reputation but she doesn’t care as long as the job gets done. They come across a true relic – a drifting Goldilocks ship that was sent 500 years ago into deep space with a cryosleep crew to find a new home for a failing Earth. What it is doing in her system is a mystery that is cracked when the only surviving crew member awakens – a very hot and diminutive Elena Oh who instantly captures the captain’s eye. As the two work out their lust for each other, the crew and ship have to deal what else they found on Elena’s ship – something that could spell disaster for not only the human race but their alien allies as well.
Obviously, I found the whole ‘romance’ aspect annoying and wish it had been jettisoned. There are a lot of very heavy liberal “love where you want” themes that, while nice, were sledgehammered into the plot. Female readers may want more character interactions but this felt more like a guy checking out a hot chick (the captain spends a lot of time sweating over scenes of Elena’s cleavage) than one female interested in another. It was hard not to roll my eyes at the fail here and clearly the future is about physical and not emotional connection between partners.
But that said, the plot was inventive and the side characters very interesting. As with all these type of ‘Firefly’ confluence of quirky characters, each one has a story to tell as to why they are unusual. And each has no problem telling Elena, our hot little neophyte, the how and why. It was nice to read the backstories but in some instances it was so overtell that you’d think no one understood privacy at all. E.g., an alien species just suddenly giving a VERY thorough and unnecessarily in depth history of their people all to explain one small situation. There was a lot of overtell.
The space and space station battles were fun. Our crew gets to explore new technology, find lots of surprises, and deal with interesting situations. It translated into a lot of action and adventure but the brevity of the scenes did make them fly a bit too fast. Especially at the end, a lot happened but felt glossed over.
In all, despite the reservations above, I have no problem giving this a four star rating as an enjoyable sci fi opera adventure. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.
The Online Eccentric Librarian 