Orion: Star Guardians, Book 1 by Ruby Lionsdrake

It had a lot of 5 stars on Amazon, and I was eager to read this series, ready to be immersed in some great reading time... well, I'm disappointed, disappointed, disappointed (what's the text? Ah, yes: DISAPPOINTED!!! ).

There are a lot of adventures, gun battles, sex scenes (with questions about "protection" this time ), hot guys... and it was as interesting as a documentary about the reproduction of mussels (well, nearly as interesting).

The responsible for this debacle: our heroine . To quote herself, she was "that horror movie girl", the one who knows there is an axe murderer outside, but wants to go out anyway to escape. But generally, this girl is a little bit afraid, or, at least, a little bit worried and ready to blow up your eardrums with her supersonic scream... but not this one. This one is ready to put the axe murderer in a tiny corner of her tiny brain in order to happily go out and hug a tree! Ah, a very important detail that the author should have taken into account: the horror movie girl is NEVER the heroine (and after reading this story, I know why!)

She was as aware of the wold around her as a 4 years child. She is abducted by aliens (classic), nearly raped, sold to be eaten... and she lives all this like a great adventure, kind of "I didn't know what to do next week anyway, so why not enjoy a little abduction time"! They land on an hostile planet, and she goes out alone, all by herself, to take pictures with her phone so she could show her family what a new planet looks like! Hello? As if she'd be authorized to show prooves of the existance of aliens when she returns to earth . She even makes a selfie!

That could have been fun if the author had wanted to write about a heroine a little bit stupid but likable, or off the wall (like Stephanie Plum, for an exemple, or the heroine of Barbarian: A Science Fiction Alien Romance (Alien Barbarians of Zandipor Book 1) ), but I don't think it was the case. You can feel here that the author had wanted to creat a strong, intelligent, bold, heroic heroine... and instead, she was totally immature, fearless to the point of stupidity, she had the worst timming to initialize a hot moment with her heroe...

I can't even say that I hated her: it would imply a great amount of feelings about her, and I never reached that stage. She was not developped enough. You just know that she is a geek (not because she is a gamer or a computer science genius, but because she loves comics and old science-fiction movies), that she tried to submit a novel to publishers, but has been rejected and other small details that didn't amount to a clear vision of her.

It was an instalove kind of story, but was too shallow to believe in it. The heroe was a little bit better than the heroine, even if he was a little bit whiny for a badass bounty hunter.

I read it till the end, hopping it'd get better somewhere, sometimes, something, anything... and NO! Useless to say that I won't read the rest of the series (and you can clearly see who will finish with whom in the other books, it's not subtle at all).

Another strange thing for an author: you had to know old science-fiction movies or comic books to fully appreciate the story! Why? Because when she writes "the starship looked like the one in "Star Trek"", you'd better have seen the movie if you want to have an idea of what it looks like! She was always making references like this throughout the book and I thought it was a little too easy and showed a lack of imagination .

So: If you know and love your classical SF movies or books, and don't mind an immature heroine, you can try this book.

If not, I don't recommend it.