I saw this book on the Amazon also-boughts for my Star Wanderers books and decided to check it out. It’s a series of short novels: the first one is currently free and the others are $2.99. Like Star Wanderers, it’s a sci-fi romance, though it leans more toward science fiction than toward romance.
I really enjoyed this book! It’s a sort of romantic comedy-of-errors about a guy and a girl who go on a series of really bad dates before finally ending up with each other. She’s a member of the Earth embassy staff on a giant space station run by super-intelligent robots who view humans as a childish junior race that needs to be nurtured into galactic society. He’s a former mercenary who runs the station scrapyard and has a knack for picking up orphaned children (including one of the robots).
Their misadventures are quite hilarious. One of the running gags are the antics of the flower girls, who run their flower-peddling business with more ruthlessness than an Arab shopkeeper. They actually make more money at it than Kelly, the embassy staff employee, who can barely cover her own rent. The super-intelligent robots are the ones who run the dating service, but as each bad date leads to another diplomatic crisis of some sort, Kelly starts to feel like they’re using it more to help her do her job than to set her up. But with each new promotion in the embassy, she ends up making less and less. And those long-distance calls from her nagging mother certainly don’t help…
My favorite part of the book was watching one bad date lead to another, and wondering how these two people would eventually end up. From the way the book is structured, it’s pretty obvious that they’ll end up together (one chapter from her POV, the next from his). But some of those dates were really, really bad… at one point, she even gets kidnapped by her “date”! But when they finally do end up together, it’s quite satisfying.
So yeah, if you’re looking for a good, clean sci-fi romance with a generous helping of comedy thrown in for good measure, you’ll enjoy this book. And even if that’s not what you’re looking for, if you enjoy a good space story, you’ll probably like this one as well. I’d rate it 4/5 stars, and look forward to reading the next in the series.
