Genre: science fiction - space opera
Pairings: f/f/f
Queer Representation: cis lesbian
Warnings: none
Rating: five stars

Review
All Alana has ever wanted is to be an engineer on a real live spaceship. A crippling, chronic illness for which she can barely afford medication, as well as her family's poverty (and the general lack of ship engineer jobs), has kept her from achieving her dream. When the intoxicating Tangled Axon comes to her repair yard--dripping seduction like THE SHIP WHO SANG--Alana takes a chance and stows away, hoping that the crew won't find her before they're too far from her planet to make a return trip. But the crew have their own plans, including kidnapping/coercing Alana's sister to save a dying crew member. Alana must find her place on the ship, save her sister and the crew she increasingly grows to love, all while trying to keep herself from succumbing to Mel's Disease.

General
Noting how well the catch-line 'lesbians in space' sells books, I'm really surprised there aren't more excellent lesbian space operas like this in the world. ASCENSION is evenly paced, and filled with wonder and action and all the right kinds of emotions. It's the Star Wars we all wanted, but will never get because Hollywood would implode if someone suggested black women leads (and heaven forbid one of them be struggling with a chronic condition). The elements of magic blend seamlessly with the tech, the secondary characters are well developed, and it has multiple layers of relationships. It is the quintessential space opera, but with enough lesfic elements and shoot-em-up moments to keep any reader happy.

Relationships
There are a number of strong relationships in the book. Central to the story is Alana's relationship with her sister, Nova (the 'Jedi' of the book), who is presented as a pretentious asshole with a fierce protective streak. The journey of the two sisters finding each other rang very true to sibling dynamics, and was immediately a hook for me. The second strong relationship was between Alana and Tev (the love interest), which was exactly the kind of slow burn I love in a book. The relationship develops slowly (but not so slow you want to throw the book into your window), and the eventual coming together of the characters is sweet but passionate. Tertiary relationships, between Alana and the other crew members, are engaging and do not in any way detract from the main two relationship plot threads. Every interaction pairing was intuitive and rewarding.

Parallels
Like any space opera, this one pulls from a number of familiar elements. Readers will find Tangled Axon reminiscent of THE SHIP WHO SANG, or, if you're a younger reader, the ship from THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET. Star Wars parallels saturate the narrative, from the Jedi-like sister (seriously, we aren't the fugitives you're looking for. Look! I have a tail!) to the 'just-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-law' semi-fugitives, to the scruffy pilot. ASCENSION blends these elements into a comfortable, familiar yet exciting narrative with far more diversity and marginalized voices than the mainstream book/cinema has managed to ever produce (Black Panther aside, cause that was awesome).
​
Randoms
The engineer of the Tangled Axon is a wolf-man. Not a werewolf. A wolf-man. He has some type of wolf soul. I'm still sort of unclear on this but every time he was on page, I could only think about the 'dinosaur souls in buff men' book series by Nina Bangs. Full disclosure- they're not gay at all but they're...an experience. Yup. 
Anyone in the mood for excellent space opera can find ASCENSION: A TANGLED AXON NOVEL here in ebook. The book is out of print (ARGH!), so if you want a paper copy, you'll have to cough up $30 to get it used.

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!)


​
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.
​
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

​