A space opera with a sense of humor, Chilling Effect follows the crew of the La Sirena Negra as they deal with the complications following the abduction of Captain Eva Innocente's sister. With a refreshing humorous timing and complicated, sympathetic characters, this novel brings to mind the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and the Mass Effect series.

A special thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a free advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

DNF at 4%

Eh, just not feeling it.

I don't know what it is, but it's not holding my attention. Maybe because in 4% I've already read three or four descriptions of Eva's tangled black hair? I dunno. I feel snarky tonight, and I'm just not feeling it.

Maybe later, maybe never.

Probably never.

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

I'm gonna be honest with you, I haven't laughed so much or been entertained by something so well, in ages. I love every bit of this story. I love the lead character, I love her crew, and I love the adventure that she took us on while trying to free her sister.

I especially love the Spanglish sprinkled across the conversations our lead has with her crew, her enemies, or when she's just lamenting evil psychic cats. (I said what I said. These cats were woah!) As a Latina it was important and paramount to me to see our leads Latinidad. Because of that I felt seen, served, and fed like no other book has done in a while.

Also, kudos to Valerie Valdes for the world she created. From the creatures to the communities, I wanted to know more. The creatures felt real and like I could pass one of them in a space station beyond my galaxy. And the communities felt like ones I'd run from or join, sometimes I wasn't too sure. *insert laugh track here*

Point is, Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes was a fantastic thrill ride. And I know "fantastic thrill ride" sounds cheesy and probably has been said 500 times over, but it's true and I stand by it!

First of all, any story that begins with genius, psychic cats on a spaceship has me from jump. And that’s exactly the way that Chilling Effect starts, with Captain Eva Innocente running around La Sirena Negra trying to chase down her cargo; 20 genetically engineered, hyper-intelligent and hypnotic felines.

And just when she thinks she’s finally corralled the last one – everything goes pear-shaped. Which turns out to be a metaphor for this entire space-romp of a story, as Eva and her crew find themselves running a game both with and against the biggest criminal organization in the galaxy, trying to save Eva’s sister, their own hides, and one of the big secrets of their universe.

It’s an edge of your seat ride through every jumpgate in the known universe to see if Eva can get her ship, her crew, her family and her soul through this adventure relatively unscathed.

And that’s adventure in the sense of something terrible and/or frightening happening to someone else, either long ago, far away, or preferably both. Eva only wishes it were happening to someone else – frequently and often, while cursing in Spanish, English and possibly a few other languages along the way.

But it’s happening to her, whether she wants it or not. And while she certainly doesn’t want that adventure, she does want to save her sister and the rest of her family. No matter who, or what, gets in her way.

Escape Rating A+: There have been plenty of comparisons already between Firefly and Chilling Effect. I think the best one that I read said something about if Firefly and Mass Effect had a baby midwifed by Guillermo del Toro, that Chilling Effect would be the resulting book baby.

I think there were more parents and grandparents involved, but I’ll still grant the idea of del Toro as the midwife because it’s just plain cool.

The resemblance between La Sirena Negra and Serenity, the Firefly-class ship in the series, along with its motley, barely-on-the-edge-of-legality crew, is out and proud and adds to the long list of stories inspired by that series. Firefly casts a long shadow for such a short-lived show.

There are also plenty of points where Eva reads a lot like the female Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect – just with an even looser relationship with the law and the truth.

But it feels to me as if Chilling Effect also has at least two SFnal “fairy godmothers”, Kylara Vatta from the Vatta’s War series and Tess Bailey from Nightchaser. In both of those female-centric space operas, you get the same kind of leader who is on the run from deep, dark secrets that are buried, not at all deeply in the family tree, that the heroine must confront in order to be free.

In addition to the terrific characterizations of Eva and her crew, part of what makes this story so good are its exploration – and eventual complete skewering, of a trope that normally makes readers cringe.

I’m talking about the overused and now hated convention of putting female characters in literal or figurative refrigerators, in other words, freezing them out of the narrative, so that they become an object to motivate a hero into action to either rescue or avenge them.

In Chilling Effect, Eva’s sister is put into cryo-sleep by a criminal organization known as “The Fridge”, moving Eva and her crew to great lengths in order to free her and ultimately discovering the secrets behind The Fridge and the ancient race who seeded the galaxy with jumpgates (and linking back to Mass Effect yet again.)

But instead of motivating a man and leaving the female character offstage for the rest of the story, we have a woman moving the galaxy to rescue another woman, with a mixed-species and gender crew. The whole thing works as both impetus and send-up in one glorious smash!

It’s pretty clear that I loved Chilling Effect from that opening scene, and that I can’t wait for the next book in the author’s Untitled Space Opera series. (That’s literally what the series is called, but the next book does have a title, and that’s Prime Deception.)

But there’s one more thing I want to get into before I let you go off to read Chilling Effect.

It’s an important part of Eva Innocente’s story that she and her family, and even the colony they came from, are, like the author, of Cuban descent. This isn’t just window-dressing, that origin story both underpins Eva’s actions and peppers her language with phrases from that heritage.

I had to look up a lot of the idioms, and I highly recommend that you do. They are often hilarious, always informative, and add to the flavor and texture of the book and the characters in ways that just feel right.

As someone who grew up in a household where another language was frequently sprinkled into the conversation, there are concepts that just don’t translate from one language to the next, in spite of the English language’s often-quoted propensity to not merely “borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

The way that Eva mixes the Cuban phrases that she learned as a child add to the depth and verisimilitude of her character – and I feel that adds to the story whether I initially understand what she’s saying or not. (After all, that’s what Google Translate is for.) And I want that representation for her because I also want to see it in other stories – and am – for myself.

So I may have gotten into this story for those psychic cats, but I stayed for Captain Eva.

Captain Eva Innocente of the spaceship La Sirena Negra and her crew are staying above water by making money any way they can and currently that’s transporting these crazy psychic cats that keep escaping from their cargo hold.Eva is then contacted by a secret society “The Fridge” aka the space Mafioso, that has kidnapped her sister Mari and forces her to complete missions in order to spare Mari’s life.

Y’all this book was a trip! It did have a slow start, but that went away real quick after the 4th chapter. All kinds of crazy space adventure shenanigans happened. There was so much to appreciate about this book; Latinx main character, the focus on family and loyalty, the world building and character development was incredible, the fight scenes were epic. I’m a big fan of sci-fi movies like Firefly, Galaxy Quest & my all-time favorite, The 5th Element, so that was an enjoyable read for me.

If you are into any of these films or a fan of YA-fantasy, I recommend checking this novel out. 4/5 stars

Many Thanks to the NetGalley & Harper Voyaer for gifting a copy of the amazing novel in exchange for an honest review.

I really loved this novel! I'm a big Mass Effect fan and I appreciated all the references. Also, I love space adventures and this is the first one I've read that is unapologetically Latinx. I love how much Spanish was in it. This book is fun and has psychic cats and space dinosaurs! Love it!

There were a lot of good things about this book, and I wanted very much to like it. The cover is adorable and the premise sounded good. Also, the main character is a POC, and while SFF as a whole genre has been slowly diversifying, finding different voices in space opera is still refreshing. It also had funny moments and was very action-oriented (a good thing when some space operas tend to be very focused on describing worlds and politics).

However, something about this book just was not my cup of tea. I think the major sticking point is that the love interest is an alien. And not a humanoid alien; a vaguely insect-like alien that communicates partially through modifying its personal scent. It was...odd. But I may also be interpreting this the wrong way because this book didn’t describe the characters appearances all that much.

Also, while it was fast-paced, the story felt more episodic with the only connections between the crew’s adventures being the shadowy conspiracy organization and the unfortunate tendency of the emperor to show up.

Would I recommend it to others? Yes and no. I would need to know more precise details of what kinds of features a particular reader wants in their stories.

Chilling Effect is Valerie Valdes's first novel, but you'd never know to read it. Expertly paced, entertainingly plotted, with a wonderful dose of Internet humour, it's hard for me to say enough good things about this book.

What are some of the other things to like?
* Psychic cats!
* Mom jokes!
* Dinosaur romance!
* Chapter titles that will make you groan!
* Nuanced female characters!
* Bilingual hijinx!

The protagonist, Eva Innocente, is a reformed rogue who's trying to make ends meet for herself and her loyal crew by doing honest work. When she gets an encoded message from THE FRIDGE, a shady mafia-like organization who manipulates people around the known universe for their own dubious ends, she'll have to choose between doing what's right, doing what's in her best interest, and doing what she needs to do in order to protect her family.

And it won't be an easy choice--what with the hold full of undeliverable psychic cats. And the homocidal alien emperor who wants to make her into his "broodmare." And her maybe-mutual attraction to her engineer. And...

Well, you get the picture.

(And can we take a minute to enjoy the genius of a chapter titled WOMAN IN THE FRIDGE? So pop culture reference! Much meta! Wow! :D)

One of the great pleasure of this book for me was the tone of the writing, which was wry and self-aware without distracting from the events of the story--a lot of fun throughout. I also really enjoyed the occasional Spanish--which I don't speak, but which added a lot of flavour to the text, and which never stopped me from understanding the plot or whatever was going on in a specific scene.

There's also a great cast of characters, from Eva and her crew to the various pseudo-antagonists.

Bottom line: If you like Firefly, Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker's Guide, or other SF romps, and if you appreciate nuanced female characters with the odds stacked against them and their found families, you'll love this book.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a Twitter buddy.

Eva Innocente and her crew may not be rich, but at least they're honest--mostly honest--welllll, more honest than Eva's family. So when Eva's even-more-honest sister is kidnapped and threatened by a galactic crime syndicate called The Fridge, Eva has to save her--even if some of the decisions she makes along the way are not technically what would be known as wise or sensible or OH MY GOD EVA WHAT ARE YOU DOING. There are spaceship maneuvers, low-gravity cats, brain parasites, human-alien relations...in more senses of the word than one...fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, true love...actually I'm not remembering the fencing very well. But this is in fact a kissing book, and also there are true friends who stick with the heroine.

Also she expresses herself in emphatic Spanish from time to time, so if that's a thing you need--and for some of you it definitely is a personal positive, I know--and the rest of you can pick up what you need to from context, trust me. No, you can. Suck it up, buttercups, you can do Klingon, the Spanish is great.

Here's my caveat, though, having read it but also seen the marketing and some other reviews: there is a purple upbeat Julie Dillon cover, and the first chapter features the cats, and the word "fun" is getting used a lot for this book in discussions I've heard. How much you parse it as a pure fun adventure is likely to depend on how you read a book where one of the main engines of plot is (and this happens very early, so I don't feel like it's a major spoiler) the threat of sexual violence against the heroine. Because there is a very persistent sexual violence threat against the heroine. It is, in fact, one of two or three central things that drives the plot. If you don't find that fun or relaxing--and I don't--you might still find this book interesting and well done for the things it is doing--and I did--but your "fluffy fun yay!" quotient is going to vary considerably. One of the things it is not doing is providing a place where people who find the threat of sexual violence stressful can relax and read about space battles and cats and aliens and spaceships. Not every book has to do that, but be forewarned that this one is not. Well-written, yes; fluffy, no.

(I've also seen some assumptions that this must be YA based on the cover and--let's be real here--the fact that the author is a woman of color. Don't do that. This is adult space opera, go read it as adult space opera. Or not, if you were looking for YA! But be clear that Valerie never once claimed this was YA, not even a little. Know what you're getting.)

I'm glad to see this book, and I think we need more books from a latinx perspective, particularly fun sci fi! This one was a little too silly for me, but I'm sure there's an audience for it somewhere.

First of all, I’d like to thank NetGalley and Harper Voyager for allowing me to read Chilling Effect as an eARC!

“That’s like five bad plans you’ve had in two minutes. How are you still alive?”

To say I love Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes is an understatement. From page one, we are thrust into a world full of adventure and wonder-and psychic cats. Eva is the pilot of spaceship La Sirena Negra, and she and her ragtag crew make money where they can to stay afloat. When Eva is contacted by a secret society with a penchant for not taking no for an answer, she quickly is in over her head and must decide what it means to be a family.

If you’re a fan of Firefly or Guardians of the Galaxy, you’ll love Chilling Effect. It’s fast paced and colorful, and the world building and character development is incredible. I always enjoy a story where I can vividly see the world, and the characters, and Chilling Effect delivers that. Occasionally, you do have to fill in some blanks about the characters, and the way the aliens look-which is fine, because that’s the fun part about science fiction and imagination. I’m still not entirely sure what Vakar looks like, but to my best calculation, I believe he’d look like a cross between an actual stink bug and Cassandra from Doctor Who. This doesn’t detract from the story at all, and is more a personal curiosity to see concept art or fan art of what other people-or Valdes-think the characters look like.
Speaking of the crew, I thought it was awesome how each team member had their moment to shine. It’s Eva’s story, but it’s also a story about family, and this motley crew is her family. Eva is also a fantastic character, with problems and issues that are real, tangible, and relatable, despite the sci-fi setting. She’s got a tough shell to crack, but we see her heart is always in the right place.

Chilling Effect also took science fiction tropes and made them fresh again. For example, one piece of story is about Big, Scary, Ancient Aliens who built mysterious objects that people use, but don’t fully understand. This could describe any number of science fiction things, such as Stargate, Torchwood, Smallville, etc (not trying to pick on science fiction television-it’s just the first things that came to mind).

I appreciate it when a book comes along, like Chilling Effect, that turns science fiction genre around and gives it a new perspective. While I know this story is probably finished, I kept hoping I’d turn the page seeing a blurb about how the crew of La Sirena Negra would return soon. I really hope this book succeeds, and that Valdes continues to write more books like this.

Again, thanks to NetGally and Harper Voyager for allowing me to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

"A hilarious, offbeat debut space opera that skewers everything from pop culture to video games and features an irresistible foul-mouthed captain and her motley crew, strange life forms, exciting twists, and a galaxy full of fun and adventure.

Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra cruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for even smaller profits. When her sister Mari is kidnapped by The Fridge, a shadowy syndicate that holds people hostage in cryostasis, Eva must undergo a series of unpleasant, dangerous missions to pay the ransom.

But Eva may lose her mind before she can raise the money. The ship’s hold is full of psychic cats, an amorous fish-faced emperor wants her dead after she rejects his advances, and her sweet engineer is giving her a pesky case of feelings. The worse things get, the more she lies, raising suspicions and testing her loyalty to her found family.

To free her sister, Eva will risk everything: her crew, her ship, and the life she’s built on the ashes of her past misdeeds. But when the dominoes start to fall and she finds the real threat is greater than she imagined, she must decide whether to play it cool or burn it all down."

I could lie, and say that the reason I picked this book up is my love of space operas that skewer, but in truth it's because, OMG THERE'S A CAT WEARING A SPACE HELMET ON THE COVER!!!

I could not finish this book. I wanted to really like it because the premise seems fantastic, but after 50 pages I was skimming more than I was reading. I didn't care for the descriptions, the characters, or even the cats. I appreciate the idea of a female Malcolm Reynolds type character of latinx descent with a for hire ship and crew, but the execution didn't grab my interest. Hard pass on this book for my YA collection.

Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes 9/17/19 (Harper Voyager) – Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra are your classic rag-tag bunch of ne’er-do-wells skirting the edge of the law. Things get more complicated than usual when Eva becomes the desired object of affection for a galactic warlord while learning that her sister has been kidnapped by the equivalent of the mob and that she has to run their increasingly dangerous errands, ‘less something should happen to her sister. Eva lies to her crew, lusts for her scaly alien engineer, and generally runs headlong into trouble. Something should have a chilling effect on her, but nothing much seems to.

As soon as I saw Chilling Effect advertised as a mix of Firefly and Mass Effect, I knew I had to send a review request (Thank you, Harper Voyager!). Psychic cats, pompous alien emperors, and a mysterious villainous organization wreaking havoc sounds right up my alley. I’m a huge Mass Effect fan so while reading I was reminded of my favorite parts of the game. Captain Eva could definitely have been friends with my fem-Shep. Irreverant, kick-ass, and a bit of an anger problem, Eva was so much fun to read about. I didn’t completely jive with her but I was happy to watch her adventures and interact with her crew. I loved the sketches that were the side characters and I sincerely hope they get their chance to shine as the series continues. Chilling Effect had a great balance of humor, action, and drama. The villainous organization, the “Fridge”, always cracked me up.

The characters were all older than I am (by a small amount anyway) but I found them very relatable. I had some issue with the Spanish phrases/terminology because my language abilities are firmly with English, a bit of Korean, and a smidge of German. At first I took the time to look up the phrases but eventually, I gave up and I’m concerned that it took away some of the enjoyability for me. Not that the author should change it necessarily, but maybe add in footnotes for the readers that struggle so we aren’t filling in gaps and departing from the author’s intent.

I found myself wishing for more world-building. Science Fiction and Fantasy can be tough as it usually, takes a significant amount of world-building to truly immerse me as a reader. I also frequently lost track of Varak’s various emotional scents. I had trouble keeping up with the various races, hierarchies and what have you. I’m sure a bit will change between my version and published and I can only hope that different alien races are either capitalized or italicized to help me differentiate. I found myself wishing I had a physical copy so I could flip back for a refresher. As it was, the romance was a bit lackluster for me and the added difficulty with the scents made it tough to stay immersed in the story. The team has already been together for a significant amount of time so we miss the budding relationship, and it felt like all we were waiting for was the big reveal which is a bummer. Granted this isn’t a romance, but a space opera, so maybe my expectations are skewed a bit. Also, I need more psychic cat moments! The scenes that are there were incredibly funny and I grew awfully fond of those tiny crew members.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this romp and it is an admirable effort for a debut novel. With a bit more world-building and canon, I could see myself loving a TV or video game adaptation. I will definitely be looking for the next book in the series!

**Reviews have been posted to Goodreads and Bookbub (5SEPT)
**Full review will be posted to Dream Come Review (17SEPT)

In many ways, this delightful, supersonic-paced space adventure reminded me of Amber Royal’s Free Chocolate. Both involve fascinating and occasionally romantic relationships between humans and aliens, resourceful heroines, mad chases through space, and a text liberally sprinkled with Spanish phrases (or in the case of Royal’s book, Spanish and Portuguese) that reflect the protagonist’s fluency and mixed heritage. (And an added benefit to reading both on an ereader is the ability to easily check for a translation.) I hope these two books signal a wave of multicultural, multilingual stories.

That said, Chilling Effect is very much its own story. Eva Innocente (that’s Captain Eva Innocente of La Sirena Negra) ekes out a living transporting various cargo (including a litter of telepathic kittens the recipient doesn’t want), when her sister is kidnapped by the crime syndicate, The Fridge, and forces Eva into one unsavory job after another in order to gain her sister’s freedom. That description skips over Eva’s wonderfully colorful crew, one of whom – Vakar, her engineer -- communicates his emotions by odors that Eva interprets as things like licorice, roses, and burnt rubber, and the hilarious adventures she has on the way. Very early in the story, she turns down the lecherous advances of the Glorious Apotheosis, a fish-faced Jabba-the-Hutt emperor who then pursues her ship across the galaxy, spouting overblown threats in her general directin. Eventually, Eva turns the tables on The Fridge and discovers the method to their mad schemes, which involves a mysterious, incredibly powerful ancient Proarkhe alien artifact, finding love in unlikely places, getting stuck in cryo for a year, getting double-crossed by her shyster father, finding out her sister isn’t as helpless a victim as she’d been led to believe, and never getting rid of those kittens.

There’s a ton of action and cool details in this story, but for me the best part was the characterization, both of Eva and of the other wonderful beings who inhabit this universe and touch her heart, and, by extension, the reader’s.

The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to praise it. Although chocolates and fine imported tea are always welcome.

I received an advanced copy through NetGalley.

<i>Chilling Effect</i> is a quirky space opera adventure reminiscent of Firefly, with an eclectic space crew captained by Eva. When Eva finds out her sister has been kidnapped by a nasty crime syndicate, she takes on a series of terrible jobs--all while keeping the truth secret from her crew. Of course, everything goes wrong, but does so in surprising ways. That's part of the fun of this book. It's a total screwball romp. You have no idea what's going to happen next. There are many little video game tributes throughout that made me grin, too.

Eva's a fun heroine. Well-meaning, edgy, and competent at her job. Her voice, with Spanish sprinkled throughout, is wonderfully authentic. I've only seen this done by one other scifi book, Amber Royer's <i>Free Chocolate</i>, and here's hoping more such books are on the way.

I'm betting the cover of this book alone will sell a bunch of books. It gets across the fun vibe quite well. I think about my only complaint is that I wanted more of the cats!

A lot more creative species of alien than most space operas. Tons of action and adentures. Would keep Google translate on stand by if you can not read spanish. Can't wait to see what's next.

Thank you Netgalley for the Arc.

Did not finish at 20%. This one just wasn't for me.
Too many space cliches, poor worldbuilding, and so, so, many cats. The humor felt quite contrived.
I do dig the bilingual aspect though.

I came for the cats and the scifi. I left because it wasn't the story I thought I was getting. I guess it was a DNF for now?

The first of the book was a great setup and reminded me of adventure books like Starflight by Melissa Landers. (Which is what I wanted.) Then after the first few chapters it started to drag. And I was tired of having to stop every few paragraphs to Google translate the Spanish. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved the bilingual dialog, I just wanted a fun story at the moment and it was currently offputting. I did also end up skimming to see how the story continues and I may pick Chilling Effect up again at a later date. I definitively have full intentions to.

Thank you so much to HarperCollins/Harper Voyager for approving me for this title. 😻