I intended for this book to be a light, fluffy read. Picked up in an airport bookshop as something to occupy me as I headed out to a summer teaching gig in Boston, I thought I was going to read a cute (and possibly spicy) romance set in a spaceship. I did not expect the emotional rollercoaster of stress, excitement, and sheer existential dread this book would pull out of me. It’s stood the test of time and is just as good on a reread as that first experience.
Read If Looking For: space thrillers, emotional romantic connections, looming dread
Avoid if Looking For: straightforward romances, thorough worldbuilding
Elevator Pitch:
Ambrose is an astronaut from ‘not UN’ and Kodiak is from ‘not Russia’. The two countries, in a long cold war, have sent the two young spacefarers on a rescue mission. They aren’t supposed to interact at all with each other unless absolutely necessary, but Ambrose is curious about his hot neighbor, and who else is he supposed to talk to on this ship? But there are also some unexplained oddities that are nagging at him.
What Worked for Me
It’s tough to talk about how much I love about this book, because to do so would involve heavy spoilers. Suffice to say that the book starts by feeling like a relatively straightforward romance with forced-proximity tropes. If it stayed as that, it would have been a good book that I enjoyed reading.
There comes a moment though, where you realize that the seemingly innocent romance book has instead turned into something utterly different than what you expected. I found myself absolutely hooked at that point, and spent a few hours in the airport finishing the book because of how much I was in love with the story it was telling. While not a horror book, it definitely is going to stretch your levels of discomfort far more than you’d expect, and does a great job of asking big questions and forcing you to sit with them as you watch the story to play out.
So not, under any situation, look up spoilers for this book. Go in blind (or, as blind as you can be after this review) and enjoy the ride. If you reach the halfway point and aren’t gripped, maybe the book isn’t for you.
What Didn’t Work for Me
As much as I adore this book, I think this book does suffer from what a lot of romance books stumble into: oddly forced characterization. For the first third of the book, I found the two characters more a bag of character traits to interact with each other than believable people in their own rights. This faded over time, but definitely prompted my tepid reaction to the first few chapters of the book.
In Conclusion: a bit of a slow start that is far deeper than the trope laden romance the book would lead you to believe.
- Characters – 3
- Worldbuilding – 3
- Craft – 4
- Themes – 5
- Enjoyment – 5
Marked for Plot 
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