There are definitely positive aspects to this book. It is very readable, fast-paced and entertaining. However, in Sci-Fi I'm always looking for new ideas and imagination, which was distinctly lacking here. The odd sparkle - I enjoyed the underwater world, but enough. What was better than average for a Sci-Fi book was that the author clearly understood both technology and how engineering works (I read that she has worked as a software engineer), which was certainly a nice change. What I didn't enjoy was the rather cloying and repetitive romance, a bit Mills & Boom in space, which could have done with some more rigorous editing in my opinion. An aspect that I really didn't like was that at the end of the volume there was nothing resolved, no ending and purely a lead into the next book in the series. I must confess that I got the book for free, legit via a mailing list, but rather than encouraging me to buy the next volume in the series, it put me off because what if the next one also has no really ending and just an introduction to the next volume?