Fans of found-family narratives, high-stakes adventure, and relatable romance will find a lot to love here.
A prickly space pilot, her unexpected new love, and an alien companion face ruthless pirates and corporate conspiracies in Black’s SF romance.
Captain Zephyra “Zeph” Zamora and her Uncle Jack work best as a team. Together, they run missions for Cellexis, a powerful corporation that’s leading the ambitious effort to solve Earth’s water crisis by creating the LunaRing Reservoir, which consolidates water gathered throughout the galaxy. When a disaster tears apart one of the company’s space stations, Zeph is compelled to rescue Stellan, a man she’s only just met, and bring him aboard her ship. Though she’s reluctant to trust him at first, Zeph gradually allows Stellan past her defenses, revealing both the painful history she’s spent her life outrunning and a closely guarded secret: Vim, an alien “chaos bear,” is living on her ship. (“The creature pushed off the bulkhead and floated toward them, its eight stubby legs, each with a hand-like appendage, pumping in the air as if it were swimming.”) The delicate new balance of personalities is disrupted when Jack is kidnapped by the Corsairs, a brutal band of space pirates with ties to Zeph’s past. Determined to help him, the others set out on a dangerous rescue mission to save the family they’ve built. Former NASA employee Black delivers a sci-fi romance full of adventure, conspiratorial intrigue, and heart. While the worldbuilding can feel a bit ponderous at the outset, the pace quickly accelerates, and the narrative becomes a gripping adventure that’s difficult to put down. The novel easily balances thrilling space exploration with a sweet (and occasionally very spicy) romance and a memorable cast. Vim’s relationship with Zeph is reminiscent of the unforgettable friendship in the film Project Hail Mary but still feels unique. The explicit romantic scenes are enjoyable and well written, adding a welcome dimension to the story.
Fans of found-family narratives, high-stakes adventure, and relatable romance will find a lot to love here.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798995740810
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Light Chaser Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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