There were mostly external forces keeping them apart - emotional growth happened for the hero but it didn’t seem to be a major blocker. Their relationship seemed to happen quickly, but that was fine. The heroine comes off as a bit of an oblivious ditz, and gets mad at the hero for not telling her things that either he didn’t know or she should have been able to surmise. I think it would have been better to make the last chapter an epilogue instead, to help cue the ending, rather than just noticing a shift in POV.

This was novella length, and I was surprised when the ending hit, which is not what you want your reader to feel. I think this may not have been a good choice to split the book in two - or that there was more needed in this book to match the first. I wanted more of an emotional arc in this on its own. I understand that 400 pages might have been too much for one book, but it may have been a better call to combine the two books and simplify the plot some to one 350 page work. This ended on a cliffhanger, which is unusual for romance. I would have liked to see him embrace it a little more as the story went on.

As a group of escapees, they have no captain, and the hero is appointed the leader for diplomacy but has zero interest in it besides getting what he wants. Interesting aliens in that they are more technologically advanced, yet socially very unstructured. But the more he learns of humans, the more he comes to admire and respect them. Earth’s proposal is shocking and uncomfortable for a fierce, independent race that relishes in their solitude. When it affords them an unforseen and unprecedented opportunity to take back their world from those who seek to destroy them, however, Aderus begins to wonder if it wasn’t fate. Forced to interact with an isolated world and its inferior, albeit curious people. But they never thought their flight for freedom would put them in an uncharted system.

But all that changes one morning, and suddenly she’s not so sure she didn’t stick her foot in it…Įscape had been their only drive, and even death was preferable to the alternative. That’s what it took to run a ship the size of a small city smoothly. Who wouldn’t? She was still happy with her career, however mundane and demanding it might be. Sure, she had always dreamed of interacting with intelligent extraterrestrial life- the real thing, not those microbes on distant moons. Such is the life of an emergency medicine specialist in the age of “post-discovery”. Victoria’s day starts out like any other aboard the transorbital ship, Phoenix.

Saving askara a sci fi romance