Review: unrealized potential
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 14, 2013
Again I am surprised at the different expectations of readers.  Some folks are happy with an imaginative premise and society and intriguing characters.  And that's enough.  I need more - consistency in writing and in detail.  Answers to questions that will naturally arise in a reader's mind.  This book would have been fairly priced at $2.99, not the $5.99 that I paid.The alien race the humans encounter are described as feline, with manes, fangs, protruding jaws, and an acute sense of smell.  So we get a strong sense of a cat-like humanoid.  Well, there's at least one other feature cats have that is just never addressed.  You are probably thinking of this very feature right now.We learn that the first alien encountered is naked, and an observation is made about his genitals.  Later we are told their "concept of clothing minimal at its most excessive."  But this clothing is never described.  And when we encounter more of these aliens, one of our MCs is confused about whether or not one of them is female.  Well, we're not told that this individual is wearing clothing.  So this creature's gender should have been obvious then, since we already know that males' junk is external and obvious and very much like humans'.I have read and thoroughly enjoyed (and prefer) books where the MC has completely evolved with respect to his sexuality and has no internal angst, conflicts, or self-esteem issues.  But it is hard to imagine a human society where sexuality has become so blasé - to everyone - so as to completely escape comment and even conscious thought.  Here though, the author completely ignores cultural or personal aspects of human sexual orientation.  This is also true of the alien race, though I can more easily accept this premise in an alien culture.The aliens have developed a very specific kind of biotechnology, and undescribed technology for tunneling, and we are told this is an agrarian society (though we don't see any evidence of this).  But they have no other apparent technology. And they seem to accept the concept of space and other suns/stars and planets, but they do not have space travel, or flight, or even artificial locomotion.  But maybe they have a planetarium just down the street we don't know about, and research programs in astronomy and cosmology?  At one point the setting changes to an alien's underground office.  How is it lit?  Is there a desk?  A chair?  A bookcase?  A cabinet?  One of the aliens is told to "lock up" a gun.  Where?  How?  Later the gun is retrieved from a "cavity in the wall."  Huh?Even given the limited observations humans had made, it was not plausible to me that they did not determine earlier that there was an intelligent species on the planet.  Intelligence exists on a continuum.  Earth is overflowing with intelligent life.  And there are milestones that mark how advanced that intelligence is: tool use, language, cooperation for survival, etc.  Any sign of advanced intelligence would naturally spur intense further investigation.  On the other hand, there were hints that perhaps the aliens' intelligence was known, but that human leadership hid this in order to exploit the planet's resources, however this was never explored.The sacrifice a band of aliens made at the beginning made no sense.  Not for a race with an acute sense of smell, and extraordinary stealth ability.  And at the end there was the puzzling mention of one of the MCs wounds, when we had not been privy to any injury.The writer bounced back and forth between the two perspectives of our MCs.  While it was clear at the beginning of different sections whose head we were in, many times this perspective became confused further in.  She was also overly fond of sentence fragments.  They can be used effectively for emphasis, but when every third or fourth sentence is actually a fragment, the effect is lost, and the writing becomes stilted.I could list more examples, but you get the picture.  If detail does not concern you, you may find this SF m/m book really enjoyable.  Despite my complaints, it was clear that this writer is talented, which made the book frustrating.  The bones were there and the book only needed more effort and better editing.