REVIEWED BY ANONYMOUS

Genre: sci fi (space opera)

Pairings: f/f, m/AI (implied female), m/f, m/m (in-world, but not POV character)

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, trans, pansexual, gay, gender fluid, nonbinary

Notable other representations: implied autism representation

Warnings: none

Rating: 3.75 stars (It’s a thing now! HAH!)


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Review

An eclectic crew aboard the galaxy’s ugliest ship (trope checkbox: ugly/dilapidated ship!) are given an extended mission to create a new ‘punch’ through space to an outlying world. Along the way we explore most every crew member in detail, people boink and find themselves, and only one person manages to die. Cultures are explored. Science is scienced. HEAs for almost everyone. Feels all around.
I have lost count of the number of people who recommended I read this book. Every Tweet request I put out for f/f space opera came back with this title, every FB post, every word-of-mouth query. So I feel pretty confident in say that people like this book. And I get it…sort of. I have mixed feelings.

Characters
To say this was a character-driven space opera would be an understatement. Characters were the plot LWtaSAP (forever after abbreviated as LW). Ninety percent of the tension in this book came from character self reflection and character interaction, not from external forces or plot driving. That was at once both refreshing and irritating, and in places this book read more like a cozy fan fiction than a novel, but on the other hand why don’t we have more books that are allowed to just exist like this? Why does space opera have to be explosions and death and war? Like, it’s opera, as in, soap opera. So really, when you think about it, LW is the quintessential soap opera in space, hence, space opera.

Plot
Not really. You sort of get the hint of one about halfway through, when the captain takes the long punch job to connect the mainly habited sections of space to a new outlier planet. The tension never really builds in this direction though, although we are treated to one pirate attack (with good tension) and one political upheaval (great tension), both of which are sadly quite short. The plot is the characters and the characters are the plot, and in this case, that means digging down into everyone’s past, exploring their secrets, and helping them find emotional resonance in whatever that means for them.
Of interest to me, of course, was the f/f pairing, which I thought was very well done. No explicit scenes at all, but enough tension that I was breathlessly flipping pages. I usually have a hard time getting into human/alien pairings, mostly because I’m (unabashedly) into breasts, but both female characters were so beautifully written and developed that the pairing seemed natural and obvious from the start. So too did the romance between Jenks and Lovey (the ship sentient AI). In no world did I ever think someone cuddling naked against a warm metal core would be erotic, but this book definitely proved me wrong (and I think we have THE SHIP WHO SANG to partially blame, for prepping me for this sexy moment decades in advance).

Science
Holy science, batman! Solid, solid science, from the tech to the ‘how do we explain space travel so that morons understand,’ to the little everyday household items, the science in this book was beautiful and well explained. Lovers of hard scifi will be at home, as will those who couldn’t care less about the hows and whys. The writing in this book is exemplary from start to finish, and makes even the most sciencey of technobabble understandable.
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Quibbles
With all this praise, why give the book under four stars? This is probably just personal taste, but the book, IMO, just wandered. I don’t mind a little wander, and I love a good drawn-out courtship, but I felt like the first hundred pages of this book were functionally unnecessary and seemed to just be filler. The book lacked in sort of standard structure, or a try-fail cycle, or even a strong narrative arc (an overall arc. Characters had great arcs). It just…didn’t seem to go anywhere, and we didn’t even get a through-line until halfway through the book. The story seemed more vouyeristic, like an episode of The Truman Show, Space Cadet Edition. We’re just…watching everyone’s everyday. We get to see all the little mechanics of the ship, and personal interactions, and minor stakes. We get extended meal times and shopping times and hugging times and it just… it dragged. But it didn’t drag in bad way, if that makes sense. Like, I wanted it to have more plot but I also didn’t mind what I was reading. This isn’t a book I’ll keep on my shelf, or that I’ll read again, but I don’t regret the experience, if that makes sense.
 
I think this book would be of interest, primarily, for those with a love of cozy, HEA fan fiction, true space science junkies, and anyone who has ever dreamed of ‘clean’ space opera without any mass death or military structures. It’s gay as hell, too, so if you just want a good time with some queer beings in space, this is also your book. It won a crazy number of awards, so it sounds like there are plenty of readers who have long awaited a space opera like this one!

- J.S. Fields
Author and Reviewer

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​NOTE: This book has also been reviewed by Rebecca for this blog. At times, we will review the same novel more than once if different members of the review team read the novel. We are more likely to spotlight debut authors in this manner, or books where different reviewers had quite different opinions.
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Genre: sci fi (light, semi-historical, spy)
Pairings: f/f, m/f, m/m
Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis gay, cis bisexual
Warnings: gore
Rating:  three stars
Review

Ridiculously attractive secret agent Diana (CIA), along with a host of male colleagues, is kidnapped by the KGB, turned superhuman, and stranded in the woods of North Carolina. Another Very Hot Woman, Nikola, a secret agent for the KGB, is tasked with tracking them down. Diana and Nikola are former lovers, both very deadly, and both out for blood.

On the scifi

This was very, very light scifi, and I think that worked for the piece. Our spies have various mutations (the mechanisms by which they get them is a bit of handwavium) that, more than anything else, renders them fundamentally immune to death. One has a third eye (literally) that allows him to see the future. One is part lizard. One has blue skin (checkbox: blue skinned alien trope in scifi. Love it). All (most?) appear to be able to regenerate after extensive injury. An appropriate level of gory language was spent exploring this, which I appreciated. What good is self-regeneration if we can’t hear the bones snapping?

On the characters

The strongest part of this book was the characters, but it was the weakest part as well. When we were given the backstory snippets, the characters came alive and the story was this beautifully woven tapestry of POV and history. When we were in the ‘now’, the characters were clunky, the POV too hoppy, and none of them really seemed to connect with one another. There were too many different names (Agent A, for instance, might have two or three names used in the book, because agent names change) and too many characters in places for me to keep them straight. The lesbian couple discussed on the back blurb didn’t end up playing as central a role as I had hoped, given the book description, but what was there was very well done. They had good chemistry, I just wish there’d been more time to explore it.

In fact, the only time I really connected with the characters was during their backstory flashbacks. Ruby, the sort of unwilling heroine, was a good focal point for the ‘in the now’ parts, but she didn’t get a lot of screen time. Again, I think my connection with the flashbacks came from the lack of head hopping and fewer characters, and the… the feels the characters had in those scenes. In the forest scenes it was mostly omg we’ve got to get out of here but we can’t die so this really sucks! Yes, it does suck, Super Secret Agent Hotness, but I want to know more about your Super Secret Agent Girlfriend and why you now want to shoot her in the face.

In fact, I would pay cash money, right now, for a spinoff short that was just Diana and Nikola’s adventures in spy school.

Nikola: How do you use this watch thingie again?
Diana: Sweetheart, we’ve been through this. Turn the dial like so. *leans in*
Nikola: *punches Diana in the stomach* HAH! Gotcha! Bet you didn’t see that coming!
Diana: *sweeps Nikola’s legs and the two fall to the ground, punching and laughing* You call that a punch? Upstart! I made you!
*The duo fall to kissing*
 
Plot

The book lacked a through line, and it took me over half the book to figure out what the actual goal was for the characters other than ‘survive’. This made it really hard to connect with anyone, and is probably responsible for my character confusion, as stated above. I didn’t mind the flashbacks at all, and the head hopping was frustrating but manageable, but the lack of a distinct goal and focus for the characters, especially at the beginning, was hard for me. I think this potentially could have been circumvented by spending a bit more time on the relationships between the characters upfront, which would have driven the tension of the final showdown up quite a bit.

Cover art

The cover is gorgeous. Natasha Snow really hit it out of the park with this one. Swoonworthy.

Overall
If you’re into mod-scifi, or spy thrillers (especially heavily character-driven ones), this book is likely up your alley. You can buy Seven-Sided Spy in ebook here and paperback here.

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