This is the type of sci-fi I like the most –  casual sci-fi with a lot of “Earth inspiration”. I don’t even really care if it didn’t make sense that there was a Jacuzzi in a hotel room on another planet; or if they spoke exactly like people on Earth do – like give me all of that! I think that’s why I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. If someone told me this was like a “casual” sci-fi rather than a hard (to understand) sci-fi I would’ve read it earlier.

I enjoyed the amount of action that the author wrote in the book. It wasn’t too much and it was easy to follow. Easy to follow for here means as much as I do love science fiction (in any format), I often sit there and go “huh?” when I’m reading a sci-fi book. You know those Tiktok videos where it goes something like “And then we traveled to dhdhgjgj and we spoke to wjergjefe” – because it’s making fun of fantasy books with weird/difficult names? That’s me but with sc-fi. I have no issue reading Fantasy and their names, it’s most of what’s in sci-fi that just has me scratching my brain 😂.

I liked Fox Axford basically just from the start. He was snarky and I love snarky characters. I’m guessing Chani Lynn Feener likes writing a lot of snarky/sarcastic characters because they were in her other book I read recently too (Abandoned Things). She writes them well, I must say! I think sometimes you get those characters who are trying too hard to be sarcastic and you can tell when you have a case of that – which isn’t the case here.

Fox was a fun character to get to know. His motivations were clear and he wore his heart on his sleeve – which I liked to see. He knew what he wanted and he just went for it, sometimes recklessly, but passionately either way. I don’t think I can ever get tired of characters who know what they want and make plans to go for it. Okay, maybe if the character is a full villain, then I’m not so happy. Grey villains get a pass, of course 😄.

I think at the very beginning I didn’t really like Jiro Arc and I was glad that that quickly turned around because he was also such a great character. He didn’t show a lot of his personality until you got to know him so I enjoyed getting to know more of him. I liked that he only showed that he, too, could be snarky but only after you got to know him – which is true for a lot of people, actually.

Shilling is another character that pops up and he’s also just a super fun character. I think the author had some fun creating him and writing him. He originally comes off as carefree but he’s revealed to be much more and I ended up enjoying his character more than I thought I would.

The relationship was very cute and just like in Abandoned Things I was grinning a lot because they’re cute, all right? They matched together well and they had a lot of chemistry – which, of course, is always a good thing. I like it when I can tell the author had fun writing characters/their banter and this is definitely one of those cases.

Dawon and Nova were two characters that while I clocked their personality early on I also would’ve liked to know more about them. I liked the easy banter the two of them had with Fox. Sure, Dawon is Fox’s cousin so they already know each other but all three of them had that easy banter between them – something I love to see in books and never get bored of it.