Rating: WARTY!
This book is a dumb - and I might add highly inapropriate - so-called romance between Nida Harper, who is a cadet at the United Galactic Coalition Academy (which is way more of a mouthful than it needs to be) and a superior officer.
Any book (or movie or TV show) that blabbers about some galactic-wide entity good or bad, or about a coalition, or about saving the galaxy, is full of shit. All it tells me is that the author doesn't have the first clue how huge and sparsely-populated the galaxy is - and I'm talking habitable planets, not even actual populations. What it does tell me is how narrow the mind is and how limited the imagination is of the author.
This novel sounded like it might be interesting, but in the end it was a joke. Harper comes off like that sad and pathetic Jar Jar Binks in the risible Star Wars 'return of the endlessly recycled movie plot' trilogy of trilogies. Her superior officer ought to be drummed out of the regiment for his inappropriate interest in someone under his command. Harper is the worst candidate at the school and would have been herself drummed out in any real world scenario.
On an evidently poorly-supervised trip to an alien world, Harper is exposed to a source of energy. Why this energy takes over her body and then ridiculously and desperately wants to return to the world where she picked it up is a complete mystery that's not explored - at least in this first volume I read. Why, when a cadet is found inexplicably unconscious and injured on an alien planet surface during what ought to have been a routine exploration, she's not hospitalized and a full inquiry conducted is another mystery. The author either doesn't understand the military, or military standards have plummeted precipitously between now and whenever this story is set.
The interest Lieutenant Carson Blake shows in her is not only inappropriate since he's an authority figure with power over her, it's inexplicable since the two are falling for each other without having spent any significant time together. So: the story is badly-plotted and badly-written.
I know authors do not have control over the book description or the cover when they essentially give up their rights as Big Publishing™ takes over their novel, but to read that Nida has "matted, black, compact curls" and then look at the cover image where she has long, flowing, straight hair tells me once again that the ignoramus who designed the cover never even so much as looked at the text underneath it. This is why I normally pay zero attention to book covers because they're typically so pathetic and misleading and aimed at the lowest common denominator - which often is the crotch, hence the cover image's tight, clinging leather, with the lowered zipper over the bulging chest. Pathetic. The cover designer ought to be chemically neutered.
I have a hard time with sci-fi characters who have ridiculous apostrophes in their name. Nida's best friend sounds like she comes from Vulcan: "J'Etem" who is Nida's token black friend, and who is, of course an alien. The first thing these two females talk about in worshipful tones is a guy, so I guess Odette Bell never heard of the Bechdel-Wallace test. J'Etem was supposed to be Nida's best friend, but after that initial introductory mention, she virtually disappeared from this story, like the author had forgotten who her best friend was. No matter what bad things happened to Nida, J'Etem didn't give a shit, apparently.
Given the image on the front cover I kept expecting Nida to grow a pair (of breasts) but she never did - always taking a back seat to the lieutenant or to the energy that raped her. I was as disappointed in that as I was in the poor biology on display here. Like in the dumb-ass Star Trek episodes, there was inter-species reproduction, which is nonsensical. I read that one alien was "An enormous man of half-human half-Yara build." No! Not going to happen! The closest species to humans on Earth is the chimpanzee with which we share a common ancestor and it's not remotely possible to hybridize those two species, so there's no way in hell a human is ever going to produce offspring, viable or otherwise by mating with an alien - unless it was through some bizarre Frankensteinian experiment in a lab.
Thoughtless writing didn't help. With a few pages I read these thing of the same charcter: "Now he had nothing to do." "He had things to do, and it was time to stop wasting the day." "Blake admitted he wasn’t busy." One could get whiplash reading a collection of stupidly contradictory claims in such close proximity to one another.
As usual there was far too much emphasis on shallow physical details and little to none of the important traits a being might have. I read, "J'Etem was stunning. She was Barkarian, and she was beautiful from her lustrous hair to her plush purple lips." Seriously? No. Just no. This novel is one of the most egregious examples of poor YA writing and it sucked.
