Reviews and Comments

152 years ago an unlikely event that ends a war between humans and alien Felen. Five people unconnected to the human government show up as the Felen besiege the center of human government with the first person able to communicate with the Felen, and negotiate a peace. Now, the crew of science research vessel Gallion finds itself in a time rift with the crew of the Jonah bearing the "Fortunate Five" who negotiated the peace. The crew has to get themselves and the Jonah out of the rift without changing their timeline.

Despite a lot of disasters thrown into the way of the cast, it never really feels like they won't succeed. The real question is going to be how they will succeed, with preserving the timeline or without? Ensemble of characters most of which are fleshed out well enough, though their backstories do lean a bit on how trauma formed them.

Ren Hutchings has another book coming out in the same universe, and I'll pick it up.

Here's the premise: Humans explore space, establishing settlements across the galaxy. Something happens, and all the settlements are on their own for hundreds of years. Many devolve to pre-industrial states without connection to other settlements. A revived Earth sends out research missions to all the settlements with a Prime Directive like instruction to observe but not interfere. But then something happens again and all the research missions lose contact with Earth, stranding researchers, who have access to life-extending health technology as well as other machines not available to local settlements.

Nyr is the stranded anthropologist. Lynesse, aka Lyn, is local settlement royalty, but is the 4th, and least important daughter. A corruption starts defeating outlying kingdoms. Royalty doesn't care much because they are outlying. Lynesse sees a bigger danger, and sets off to find the wizard of legend (Nyr) to convince him to help. Isolated and lonely, he agrees.

The story follows them in their journey, alternating points of view between Nyr and Lynesse. To him, it's just technology. To her, it's magic. They struggle to connect, and both struggle to understand if they have a chance to defeat a demon made of stuff that is unknown to both of them.

On the one hand, it's a lovely story of people trying to, and ultimately, coming together. And I mostly relate to it on that level. But also, there's a germ of ick at a dude who uses a vast power difference to be the impressive cool wizard. Tchaikovsky does a pretty good job of threading the needle so that Lynesse is both able to be impressed and also together enough not be be naive about the ancient wizard.

Shortly before I hit the road with 14 hours in the air (each way) to Lisbon, it occurred to me I would need more than one audiobook to cover the flights. By shortly, I mean about 5 minutes before I left for the airport. I vaguely remembered the Alphabet series. I wasn't expecting anything super great, but the story barely met that bar. I should have pulled something that I'd already put on my TBR.

Kinsey Millhone is a private investigator in Santa Teresa, California, modeled after Santa Barbara. Bobby Callahan hires her to investigate who tried to kill him months before in what appeared to be a car accident. Hitch is, Callahan has lost most of his memory in the crash. The crime is overly complicated, which is a thing that irritates me when it happens in crime fiction. But what really made me meh about this is that the relationship between Kinsey and Bobby is portrayed as deep and meaningful, but there's only about 4 meetings between the two before Callahan is actually knocked off. The characters and their relationships just feel so incredibly forced.