The plot meandered. The character development was good. The world was intriguing although not deep. Overall, this was a good sick day read which is what I wanted if it. ( )

I have only read the preview on amazon so far but it reads like a Star Trek fanfic. The Sadiri sounds more or less like Vulcans.

For some reason I get a feeling this will be a wildly entertaining read... You know, all that cultural clash drama?... Oh the joy of subtle contexts and variations!

Yes, *nods* wildly entertaining. To me, anyway.
I suppose that some might find it mundane and lacking in so called "high adventure"... Well, you are most welcome to find some other book to read.

A pleasurable read, highly enjoyable.
Recommended! ( )

Catastrophe strikes as a race called the Sadiri is nearly eradicated, and the remnant population strugglwa ro resurrect its culture by weeding through related species on planet Cygnus Beta. Sadiri councillor Dllenahkh is joined by planetary officials, including biologist Grace Delarua. The novel's beauty is two fold: first, an anthropological journey among various tribes and their interactions with the team, and second, the respect and growing intimacy between Delarua and Dllenahkh. A space oddity: 4.5 stars. ( )

This is a standalone science fiction book about finding appropriate wives for a group of Vulc… I mean, a group of Sadiri, after their planet has been destroyed and most of their women killed.

Ok, it’s really about more than that, but that’s the main plot that drives the story from beginning to end. The book is set on a planet where refugees from many different human cultures over the centuries have come, living in small and mostly insular communities where they maintain their own culture. The Sadiri are the most recent arrivals. Most of the story is told from the first-person perspective of Grace, a scientist assigned to help the Sadiri sort out their procreation issues.

It was interesting, and it held my attention pretty strongly after a slow start. My problem was that it started to tell a lot of interesting stories but didn’t finish them because those weren’t the stories the author wanted to tell. We meet different cultures, see hints of problems and mysteries and interesting histories at different settlements, learn just enough to want to know more about what’s going on there, and then we leave them to their own problems and move on to the next settlement. The transition from the first settlement was so abrupt that I assumed events there would somehow play a larger role in the story later, but nope.

I sometimes felt like I was reading some sort of story sampler, where we were given bits and pieces of different stories but never a full story, or at least not any of the full stories I wanted to read. The book was more about relationships than plot, I think. Not just romantic relationships, although there is some of that, but friends, colleagues, family members, relating to different cultures, etc. The main romance worked pretty well for me. I buy into them more easily when they build very slowly over time, growing first into friendship and then into something stronger like this one did, as long as they’re written well. This romance was written pretty well, but I would have been more interested in some of the partial stories if they had been fully fleshed out.

This is a hard one to rate. I enjoyed it, but it also frustrated me several times. I’m going to give it 3.5 stars and round down to 3 on Goodreads. ( )