Read disappointingly by someone with the highly improbable name of Pyper Down, this book was already displeasing me to an extent, with its sluggish, meandering pace, endless introduction of minor characters, and my difficulty of tracking exactly what was going on while driving, with its metronomic switching between scenes and characters, and with unwanted flashbacks, but it really turned me off when I got about a third of the way in and the two main characters, female Alexis, and male Caleb met for the first time in a trope antagonistic encounter which resulted in the guy ending up physically restrained on a chair.
The restraints were DNA coded and idiot Alexis managed to drop a single strand of hair onto her prisoner, so he escaped. There was a half-hearted fight and Alexis ended up pinned with her back against Caleb, him holding her own gun to her head, and all she could think about was how hot he was. Seriously? What's the next volume going to feature? Alexis gets raped and enjoys it? I honestly don't get how female authors can so disrespect their characters (and by extension women in general), and be so pathetically tied to cliché and trope.
That wasn't the only problem. Even were that scene excluded, I doubt I would have traveled much further with this author. There was far too much going on swapping in and out characters who were often indistiguishable, making it hard to track, especially when driving, and there were flashbacks, too, which might well have been set-off in a print or ebook with a silcrow, or highlighted with italics or indentation, but in an audiobook you don't see that. It's all down to the reader and I was already far from thrilled with with her performance.
The voice and main character were at odds and this distracted from the narration. Thankfully this was not a first eprson PoV story so it did have that going for it. Technically it could have had either a male or female reader; it could anyway even if it were told from Alexis's PoV, but I prefer it if the narration voice matches the main character's voice, even if it's third person. The problem is that Pyper Down didn't match the Alexis character at all, not remotely.
Down's voice is more like a society lady or a spoiled rich woman's tone and it had, for me, a really annoying and somewhat tedious cadence. Again, this was not first person, but for me the voice didn't fit a rough-and ready-rebel pilot and mechanic that was Alexis - supposedly. it did not fit her at all, and it sure as hell didn't fit a Caleba, whose name was all wrong. He should really have been called Mary Sue.
The story is set in 2322 when humans have somehow managed to spread to "over 100 worlds across a third of the galaxy." It's unclear how they did this. The author talks about going at many times the speed of light, but this is impossible and it will still be impossible even in 2322. The reason for this is that the closer something approaches the speed of light, the more mass it takes on, and therefore the more energy it takes to accelerate that mass. At the speed of light mass becomes infinite and the only way to move that is with an infinite amount of energy: ergo: ain't gonna happen.
Later, the author talks about warping space, which is a totally different thing, but which also takes an enormous amount of energy and has nothing to do with foolhardy and pointless attempts to exceed the speed of light. It's like having adjoining hotel rooms. In order to move from one to the other, you have to exit the first room, go down the hallway, and enter the second room. However, if you have a connecting door between the rooms, you can simply step directly through. You can say, "I ran at ten miles an hour from this room to the next," but no matter what your speed, you will never beat someone who uses that connecting door! That, much simplified as it is, is the difference between traveling at hyper speeds and warping space.
Another issue was that this author seems more intent on telling than showing, especially when the two main charcters finally meet up and start entertaining thoughts like they're fifteen year old boys rather than a mature man and woman. I don't mind an occasional stray thought of that nature - all people have them - but it was like these were the only thoughts either of them had after they met, and it was pathetic. It was like reading a badly-written YA novel. But I repeat myself.
So I ditched this after the 'Alex with a gun to her head' scene and I am done with this author. I cannot commend this except to the trash bin.
