Stephen Pulsipher

This was a fascinating read. The author took on a major challenge - retelling Jane Eyre in a near future science fiction setting. She did an excellent job capturing the gothic feeling of Jane Eyre. Her aunt is awful to her, the school she's sent to is miserable, and the home of the love interest feels like a haunted place. And yet it was still science fiction. There were space ships and space stations and a lost mission. The protagonist was an engineer at heart, always taking things apart and finding ways to make them better. The author made an interesting choice of creating a planet for the novel. It took me a while to figure that out, but once I did, and especially as June arrived on the planet, I understood why. She was able to do things with the planet that she couldn't do with the moon, Mars, or any other existing world in our system. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, so I was surprised to find that the Goodreads rating was kind of low. My initial guess was that readers looking for romance and readers looking for science fiction would both be disappointed by what they found. Blending such disparate genres is risky. The result really worked for me. I recommend you give it a shot.