My first mistake with this book was not realizing initially that it had the word 'chronicles' in the book description. I have a policy never to read any such books along with any which have the word 'saga' or 'cycle' in a similar vein. Since this is the first book in the Athena Lee Chronicles, the smart move would have been to have skipped it. My bad! The fact that ten sequels appeared to this opener in 2016 alone ought to be informative. But this was a story I picked up to read some time ago, so what the hell.
I started reading it and made it a ways through surprisingly, but it's a very short book - a novella so the author or publisher claims, but it's too short for a novella. I'm not even sure it's a novelette. And there's a hardback version fo it??! So the fact that I made it three-quarters of the way through is not quite the feat it may seem. Unsurprisngly, it failed to hold my interest. This is almost inevitable in a series because the first book is a prologue, and I don't do prologues either. They're tedious and pointless. I think there's been only one time I've ever had to go back and read a prologue in a novel - and that wasn't because I wanted to!
The premise was initially entertaining: that a female engineer, of which there are far too few, is stranded a long way from home and has to 'engineer' her way back was appealing to me, but the poor writing drove the appeal out of it for me. There were multiple problems with the book, the first of which was that it's in first person, the most self-obsessed and tedious voice there is. It was this which largely turned me off the story. It was not believable given the things which happened to her in the first few pages, including a head injury. The second is that it has problems with the plot, the text, and the story, including the guy who shows up early and who is described literally, as 'beefcake'.
Normally a writer who uses initials for a first name is a female, but in this case, the 'beefcake' suggests a male writer and it is. No one uses 'beefcake' any more, expecially not an alien female. So this story is really not believable, and it made me want to avoid the actual series, not read on. The fact that it's billed as a space opera is another turn off for me. The fact that it talks about a 'cabal' trying to somehow take over 'the galaxy' is a serious issue. Clearly the author has no clue how big a galaxy is or how ridiculous and pointless is the notion that one can be owned or controlled. Sorry, but no. I can't commend it based on my experience.
