Starflight (Starflight, 1)

Interesting world building. No info dumping, Yah!I got into the book and didn't want to put it down and go to sleep!Believable characters, with mysterious backstories slowly revealed.Twisty twist at the end. Didn't see that coming.The ending was okay, not perfect, but it made sense.

Starflight is my first book by Melissa Landers, but certainly won't be my last. In fact, her Alienated trilogy is already in my TBR pile! I have to say I quite enjoyed this one! It was a fun adventure in space filled with mystery, pirates, and a good dose of humor and budding romance!Solara is eager to leave Earth and find herself a new place to live with a job as a mechanic and basically have the independence she craves. The thing is, she's an orphan with no credit to her name and on top of that, she's been branded a criminal, a small one, but still. No one wants to hire someone they can't trust. So she hides them behind gloves. Much to her dismay, the only one willing to hire her as a servant is Doran Spaulding, her nemesis from high school and a general pain in the you-know-what! And naturally, Doran makes her life on the carrier ship a living heck.I was surprised by how quickly the circumstances that lead to Doran and Solara changing roles and boarding a pirate ship happen. Solara will do whatever it takes to gain her freedom and independence and if it involves using a clueless Doran, then all the better right?Since this is told in multiple third person points of view, we even get inside Doran's head for a bit. And learn that he has his own ulterior motives as well for wanting to get to the outer realms. His father had sent him on a "secret mission" and it's one he plans to fulfill to the letter. He quickly learns, along with Solara and the crew aboard the ship, that someone has turned against him and made him out to be a fugitive when he really hasn't done anything illegal at all.I really enjoyed the characters in this story! True, Doran was a complete ***hat in the beginning. But having read earlier reviews, I knew that was bound to change. Though it was going to be hard to believe that he could change himself, I was delighted to see the process. Other members of the crew, such as Cassia and Kane were another entertaining duo! These two bickered with one another constantly, but yet, you know there was something between them. It takes awhile before their story unfolds, but I loved watching these two bicker with one another! It always got a laugh out of me! And I think I heard the next book in the duology will center around them, so yay!Then there's Renny who's another older sort and a kleptomaniac but he's got a good heart. And Captain Russo was another delight! He seemed like he would be the sinister sort, but in truth he was much more fatherly like than I expected! You can't help but love these guys!This book had so much action to it! A subtle kind, as our characters are itching to get to their destinations, there's always more trouble afoot. Enforcers are after Doran, and Solara by defauly, as are Daeva, which is like a super police squad with no morals or conscience other than to get the job done, and of course more space pirates! With enemies hot on their tails at ever turn, this gaggling crew will have to work together. More importantly, Solara and Doran will have to work together!As for the romance of the story, I have to say I really enjoyed the slow burn! Solara and Doran started out hating each other then move onto being comrades, then friends, and eventually, something more! I really enjoyed this than anything more direct from hate to love. There's always so much more in between that happens with feelings, I think their progress just added fuel to the fire and once they realized that there's more to their feelings, it was just even more emotional than I could've expected!There were quite a few laughs in this one too! Solara and Doran have a way with one another. Even if they weren't aiming for laughs, it was still a funny thing to see! Especially with their teasing! And of course, Kane really got the most laughs!The suspense and pacing to this was spot on! I quite enjoyed the shocking reveal that came up towards the end! I was kind of expecting it too...like literally moments before it was revealed! LOL! There was yet another moment that took me by surprise and left me with all the feels. But it was definitely a fitting moment.The ending itself kind of leaves me thinking we're not fully done with this line of the story. Yet, things are left in a good place. No cliffhangers really, other than just the sense of wondering what our band of misfits will do next! And I'm itching to find out!Starflight was one wild read! If you're looking for adventure, romance, humor, suspense, and pirates...in SPACE, then I highly urge you to check this read out! It's an adventure you don't want to miss out on!Overall Rating 4.5/5 stars

This was a fun read! It reminded me a lot of the Lunar Chronicles, and particularly of Cinder.Solara is an orphaned teenage mechanic living in an intergalactic universe – hence the connection in my mind to Cinder. In this world, misdeeds are tattooed across the knuckles so that all the world can see them; Solara trusted the wrong boy in the past, and now finds herself marked. This dims her already poor prospects. She was a great student, but was expelled from flight school as a result. Then in a desperate situation, she finds herself indentured as a servant to the boy in her class who hated and mocked her the most. But she needs her passage paid for, so she puts up with it, distasteful as it may seem.Doran, said boy turned master, starts out a miserable rotten human being, so it takes a good deal of suspension of disbelief to buy that he’ll eventually become the love interest. People rarely change that completely, that fast. The inciting incident of their adventures together is when Doran threatens to drop her off-world at a place where she’s very likely to starve to death or be sold into prostitution, which it’s kind of hard to forgive him for later. A semi-deux ex machina moment saves Solara from this fate: she turns out to have the perfect weapon on her for just such an eventuality, one that happens to wipe Doran’s memory. But, Solara realizes, in order for her escape plan to work, she’ll have to take Doran with her.While he’s thus incapacitated, Solara convinces him that he was the servant and she the master. They barter passage onto a ship of misfits that reminds me intensely of “Firefly” (another reason to love the story). What follows is a madcap romp across the universe with ever-increasing stakes as Solara, Doran, and the crew accumulate enemies. Meanwhile, of course, Solara and Doran fall in love. Plot twists worthy of a soap opera top it all off, but the prose is so lighthearted that I’d probably have gone with nearly anything by the end.My rating: ****Language: noneViolence: present but not gratuitousSexual content: present but not gratuitousPolitical content: none

Overall this was a fun book. They did a good job with the enemies to romance portion of the story, it was believable without becoming cringey. I the characters who made up the crew were fine, and it certainly had a little bit of the feels with everyone becoming a makeshift family. I think it would have been interesting if more time was spent on world building in. However, the plot moved forward with a nice piece and the story kept my interest throughout

Definitely a new favourite.

The book follows Solara and Doran. She’s looking for a new life for herself. She needs to go to the outer realms of the galaxy to get a job and the only way she can do that is by serving a passenger of the spaceliner Zenith for the duration of the trip. But due to her felony tattoos, the only passenger willing to take her along is Doran, her highschool bully. And he does not go easy on her. Then something happens and they both end up on the ship Banshee. There, not only are they surrounded by a crew of people running from the law, they themselves seem to be running from the law.Very Firefly, isn’t it? If the synopsis doesn’t seem that way, the book definitely will. With the addition of a romance. Though I’ll be honest, in the beginning, I highly doubted the romance would work. Doran and Solara really hated each other. Solara would have happily strangled him if she didn’t need his help. And I wouldn’t have blamed her. Doran was an a-hole.Solara wasn’t my favourite either. She did some dubious stuff. But she was okay. She deserved some revenge after what Doran put her through. I liked her a lot more as the book went on. And, surprisingly, I also really liked Doran. He somehow managed to redeem himself And the romance that initially seemed far-fetched, became a reality. In a very believable way. Almost can’t believe it Melissa Landers pulled it off. And in such a fun way too. The banter between Doran and Solara was hilarious.The rest of the characters were really funny too. I loved the crew of the Banshee. They all had their own stories and reasons for being on the ship. The relationship between the characters, their interactions, the camaraderie, definitely made the book for me.The pace was fantastic too. This isn’t a very big novel and yet so much happens. And it all happens at the right, natural, pace. Another great thing was that the romantic plot was resolved at the 80% point. Usually, we’re still wondering, till the end, whether the protagonists will tell each other how they feel and if they even want be together. This time, that conflict was resolved before the climax went down.Honesty, this is a great book. It’s funny, it’s sweet and it’s entertaining. We’ve got a great set of characters, good writing and an engaging story. It’s definitely a book that you find yourself rereading often. Hell, I’ve read it at least four times.If I had one complaint, it’s that I would’ve like some more depth with the world-building. It was good for the most part. I especially loved the touch about there being a painful and expensive procedure that can make your sweat smell good. Like, humanity may never find the cure for cancer, but I can be sure that that is totally happening. Still, would’ve liked more political and geological details.Overall, great book, highly recommend. Just read it.

STARFLIGHT.. where oh where did you come from!?I feel like I heard almost nothing, no buzz, about this book -- and as I know nothing about the author, nor have I had the courage to pick up ALIENATED yet, I don't even know what prompted me to add it onto my TBR almost a year ago -- in the months leading up to it's publication and even after the release it was so very quiet in the blog and twitter 'verse, with hardly any mention of it on anyone's radar (that I saw). Or at least there seemed to be no urgency for people to read it right away. But then, unexpectedly, I saw a review comparing it to Firefly and I immediately decided to give it a try. What can I say; I'm a sucker.Except not this time!This book was so. much. freaking. fun. Maybe it's because I went into this blind, with no real expectations. Or maybe I would've loved it regardless of hype. Because other than reading like a mishmash of the aforementioned space opera show that is so near and dear to my heart, this was seriously refreshing. We have no love triangle. No insta-anything. We have pirates. We have hate-to-slow-burny-love. Tons of action. Interesting side characters. Deadly space assassins. Hilarious banter. Conspiracies. And plot twists. And who doesn't love twists?While there's a lot still unknown about the world(s), Landers did a good job giving readers what they needed to know in order to picture some of the structure to this future life of ours, but I'm hoping for more in the second book. However there is no super technical sci-fi space talk, she keeps things pretty light, so maybe that's the trade off.The fact that there was no cliffhanger (and won't be one for the next one, either) and I'm already wanting to grabby hands the sequel companion novel is a pretty awesome feeling. There's no sense of being manipulated (which, hey, I'm not really opposed to) into reading the next book in order to find out what character or event hangs in the balance for our motley crew. It's just straight up joy in wanting to dive back into this writing and this series and these characters.Even though it does appear that STARFALL is a companion novel, I would like to think the bits of Solara and Doran's story also get resolved within it's pages. For though this doesn't end on a cliffhanger we are left wondering.. what happens next? What do they do with what they learned? Unless Landers has even more planned, in which case I would be more than happy to wait and find out the answers to those questions in 2018!STARFLIGHT seems like a bit of a dark horse book. But I hope it gets a lot more attention because it definitely deserves it. Truly, an unexpected delight full of thrills, love, adventure and how you can find your home in the most unlikely of places.. and with the most unlikely of people. This will be a book I read over and over again. Highly recommend

Pretty entertaining.

This book was the first one I read by Melissa Landers and it was a very fun and entertaining read. It made me wanna read more of her. If you love sci-fi or pirates you're gonna love it!