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I really wanted to like this book - the premise is that a human girl, Sam, gets into an arranged marriage with a space nonbinary catperson, Orla, but they get into a love triangle with Orla's best friend Sorcha, who's been mutually in love with Orla for a long time but they couldn't be together because of sci-fi reasons.
I have three main problems with this book:
( 1. Doesn't deliver on the premise. )
( 2. Everything in this book happens by way of characters explaining their emotions at length to each other and that's dull. )
( 3. The impact of colonialism isn't fully explored. )
What did I like? I think the setup had a lot of potential. I think the Sionnach are pretty cute with their space cat-person stuff. I like the pseudoscience of the calamity that destroyed 90% of the Sionnach homeworld and gives them a reason to be finding offworlders to repopulate with. I do think the gifted child struggle of Sam is very real, as is Orla feeling like a letdown to her parents and suffering under the touch-starvedness of the Sionnach society. Unfortunately that's not enough to warrant a re-read. I'm not leaving this as a review on the website because this is all pretty negative, so it's going to stay on the blog.
I have three main problems with this book:
( 1. Doesn't deliver on the premise. )
( 2. Everything in this book happens by way of characters explaining their emotions at length to each other and that's dull. )
( 3. The impact of colonialism isn't fully explored. )
What did I like? I think the setup had a lot of potential. I think the Sionnach are pretty cute with their space cat-person stuff. I like the pseudoscience of the calamity that destroyed 90% of the Sionnach homeworld and gives them a reason to be finding offworlders to repopulate with. I do think the gifted child struggle of Sam is very real, as is Orla feeling like a letdown to her parents and suffering under the touch-starvedness of the Sionnach society. Unfortunately that's not enough to warrant a re-read. I'm not leaving this as a review on the website because this is all pretty negative, so it's going to stay on the blog.
