Monday, December 20, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Hunt the Stars by Jessie Mihalik

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on February 1, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.    

Hunt the Stars is the first book in a new series of space opera romance novels by author Jessie Mihalik, who previously wrote the SF romance Consortium Rebellion trilogy (Polaris Rising, Aurora Blazing, and Chaos Reigning).  I really enjoyed that trilogy - not as any kind of serious scifi, but as the type of "trashy" romance that can be really fun if you don't think too hard about the setting.  Each book in that series featured essentially a different space princess (or well daughter of an oligarch) getting into an adventure with a romantic love interest and fighting and failing to deal with a ton of sexual attraction along the way.  The trilogy was a lot of fun, and incredibly sexy (with really great sex scenes), so I was happy to dive in to Mihalik's new series.  

And well Hunt the Stars starts off very generic, as it again features a first person female protagonist  - this time a bounty hunter and former war hero - desperately trying to fight off a strong physical attraction to her former enemy - a human-like alien telekinetic/telepathic general.  You'll see certain plot points coming and it doesn't really standout for the book's first half, even if it never gets boring as it slowly unweaves its enemies-to-lovers plot.  And then the book gets into its final act, and oh my god does it get hot, steamy and sexy as all hell, ending with a hell of a satisfying release.  


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Captain Octavia "Tavi" Zarola, famous war hero of the Federated Human Planets, is now struggling to keep her loyal crew together in their practice of legal bounty hunting.  And so when a client come by with a job worth a massive amount of cash, Tavi shouldn't even be thinking about turning it down - not when her crew could use the cash and her ship could really use essential repairs.  

There's just one catch: the client is General Torran Fletcher, a famous Valoff general for the Valovian Empire, who was her greatest enemy during the war between humans and Valoffs.  If Tavi could turn him down she would, but she knows her crew really needs the credits...and so she finds her crew joined by Torran and his Valoff companions onboard their small ship, on their way to Valovia, the heart of the Empire.  

It's bad enough for Tavi that Valoffs like Torran are incredibly skilled telepaths - and have other psychic gifts alongside - but she soon finds that in person, the general's handsome, gorgeous body and mannerisms are enough to drive her body wild.  It doesn't help that the general's stubborn stubborn sense of honor drives her mad.  

But when they get to Valovia, Tavi soon discovers that Torran is hiding things from her, things that threaten to put Tavi and her beloved crew in extreme jeopardy.  And she'll find herself caught between her body's attraction, her need to defend her crew, and her own stupid sense of honor on a mission that could break not just her own heart, but the galaxy apart.....
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Hunt the Stars shares a bunch of things with Mihalik's prior novels.  The book is told exclusively from Tavi's first person narrative, with Tavi's internal monologue often being pretty long winded in a way that may absolutely rub people the wrong way (like Mihalik's prior heroines).  And Tavi's romance with Torran starts with an incredibly hard to resist physical attraction from basically the first time she meets the general in person - if you're looking for a romance where two people only realize they're attracted to each other after a period of time, that's not what you're gonna find here, even if the romance is a bit of a slow burn.  These are all staples of Mihalik's works, and they work fine here just like they did in her old works.  

Still, Hunt the Stars takes a while to get interesting, even as Mihalik's prose never makes the story seem to drag or slow down.  While the dialogue is often entertaining, neither Tavi nor Torran are particularly unique characters - they're all archetypes you've seen before without much to make them unique, with Tavi being the woman betrayed by her people and gaining a reputation she hates, living only for the loyalty to her people and Torran being the honorable soldier who puts honor and family above all.  The same is true of the rest of Tavi and Torran's crews, who are quite clearly being grouped together for what I expect are future novels in this series, although there's a hint of a non-standard grouping between two of Tavi's human crew and two of Torran's Valovian ones.  And while the telepathic/telekinetic and other psychic abilities of the Valoffs are interesting, there really isn't that much unique about the setting, setup, or plot in the book's first half to really make one thing this is anything special. 

And then you get to the book's back half, when Tavi and Torran start acting upon that attraction, and things get oh so so much better.  The book even throws a surprisingly well thought out issue of power and consent into their relationship, and that works around that issue in ways that are insanely hot and sexy, even without the two of them going all the way till the book's final chapter.  I have read quite a number of SF/F and paranormal romance novels where the romance works but the sex scenes are just meh to outright bad, and that is definitely not the case here - these are some incredibly well done sex scenes, both in the mundane sense and in how Mihalik writes Torran's ability to amplify the experience with his own psychic abilities.  Let's put it this way, I bookmarked one of these scenes after I read it so I could get back to it easily, it's that good. 

The story ends with the general plot arc not resolved, but Torran and Tavi's relationship solidly established, allowing Mihalik presumably to move on to the other characters' relationships going forward.  If there's a complaint about the romance I have other than the slow first half, it's that the enemies-to-lovers description is kind of halfhearted, because the two leads aren't really enemies by the time the book begins, but it honestly doesn't matter in the end.  If you're looking for scifi romance, and are willing to endure a bit of a slow burn for a hundred pages or so, this will eventually fully reward you in an enormously satisfying way.    

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