Full Speed to a Crash Landing

A short and fluffy space heist book. It's part of a trilogy of novellas, and so it leaves a bunch of larger worldbuilding questions unanswered. I love that the last ~15% of the book is reports with footnotes where there's a slow realization of what has just occurred.

The romance angle did not work for me. The book cover immediately felt like a huge indicator of a romance component so I knew it was coming, however it felt all told and not shown. What does Ada see in Rian other than immediately liking his eyes? We also don't get any of Rian's perspective here, and so it's extremely not clear what Rian sees in Ada either, and I'd honestly expect him to be more suspicious than he already is. If either was just using the other for their own ends, it would have honestly been a more interesting story.

I have a few quibbles with the heist elements too. One critical element of any sort of heist plot to me is that characters need to be deceiving other characters and more critically I think there also needs to be a deception and surprise for the reader--something unexpected, actions off page, motives unsaid. In this book, Ada lets too much slip to the reader about her secret motives and actions, while her main nemesis Rian is not effective. The book blurb says "she may not be entirely sure who's manipulating who until it's too late" and this wildly overstates the dynamics at play. I think it's also that I've read other books recently that do a better job of deceiving the reader in a way that feels effective and earned, especially The Dragonfly Gambit and even parts of Alien Clay.

Kind of feels unfair to attempt to review this one because I don't feel like I read a book so much as the first third of a book. And it just so happens that this is the first in a trilogy. Go figure.

This was a book club read for when the genre wheel landed on "romance," which feels like a swing and a miss for me in that department because the central relationship here isn't given enough room or time to develop (an arc that almost definitely gets fleshed out in the subsequent books I'm assuming). But if you go into it instead expecting a science fiction environmental/survival heist story set on a hostile planet... it's actually pretty decent! Doubly so if you're like me and enjoy female leads like Ada who are allowed to and not afraid to make mistakes and just be kind of an overall chaotic mess: Not someone you'd wanna be friends with in real life, but definitely someone you'd love to keep tabs on from a distance.

Beyond that, it's a super short book and ends on an obvious cliffhanger, but you'd probably get a lot more out of it if you commit to the entire series (which comes in at a total 496 pages by my count). Maybe I'll get around to it someday.