Review: Good follow through from book 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 6, 2014
Ahh, where to start...so Jake meets his daughter at the end of book one. As expected, he is a bit upset that Janel did not tell him and he never got to spend any time with her growing up, and she is nearly 13! That doesn't stop him from going back into space to try and rescue Janel. (Um yep, strange how time shifts between space and Earth, but ok. I'm not going to try to understand that one.) Similar to book 1, I can say that I spent quite a bit of time alternating between emphatizing with Jake and wanting to smack him. But as I said in my review of book 1, Janel is not blameless. As a matter of fact, I don't know how two people could fall in love with all of the mistakes they both keeping making.Janel is one tough cookie. Maybe too tough. Or is that just a facade? After getting captured, tortured, raped, and beaten by the Consortium, she manages to escape by releasing a virus. She is half dead when Jake and team finds her. Unfortunately, she (through no fault of her own) transmits the virus to the ship, which happens to be sentient. Yep, whole lot of sci-fi folks. The ship goes on a killing spree. Although not fully healed from her ordeal at the hands of the Consortium, Janel proceeds to assist with trying to set things right on the ship, and gets captured again...by the sentient being on the ship. In the meantime, Jake goes between being angry with her for all her slights to trying to determine what he feels for her in general to making decisions about HER life that he has no right to make. Thanks to John, Jake has a wake up call and realizes that there IS more to life than sitting around letting it pass him by. Including the chance to love again. Eventually he'll step up again to help with rescuing Janel again, and hopefully grab that happy ever after they are both looking for. I can say that her response to rape was a little glossed over. I don't know how anyone could just put it behind them even if it had happened before and they learned to get past it.I definitely missed John and didn't get enough of him in this book, but he came through when we needed him. I can say that I'm still not sure when or how Jake finally did fall in love again...if he wasn't hooked by the end of book 1, book 2 didn't give them a whole lot of time or opportunities to grow attached again. Not to mention all of the pushing away they both did. After the soul bonding, I could see how that attachment would grow, but maybe he just needed a nudge to let him know he did feel that strongly 5 years ago and was too scared to act on it. Either way, I did like where we went and hope to see more of this group of characters.