I love scifi, and this was right up my alley. What a great read. I'm going to be on the lookout for more from this author in the future.

I had this book for a while before I got around to it. Even after I started it, I misjudged the direction in which it was heading. By the time I finished the book, I had liked it. Not unlike the characters in the novel, I seemed to have gone on a ride of highs and lows in finishing this.
This is based in a dystopia of a world where humans have colonised the milky way and beyond. Travel between different planets is common but expensive. Paid work is slightly different from what we know in the real world. The world-building was simple and built upon itself as the story progressed. The thing I liked in the entire story was the characters - at least the good guys. They seemed realistic and interesting, I will not, however, comment on the bad guys because they were not convincing enough. That is probably why I liked the story in its entirety but was not blown away by it. It starts off like it might drift into a love story but after the first few chapters focuses more on their journey and the smaller issues (and later the bigger ones) plaguing them. It is essentially an adventure story set in space, in the future with some romance sprinkled in.
The writing was straightforward, easy and quick to read. Once I got going, I finished the book in one sitting.

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

This was OK, but not great. The romance was leisurely and clean; the mystery subplot wasn't that mysterious (I spotted the "surprise" criminal well before the characters did); the technology didn't make a whole lot of sense; there seemed to be elements that had either been incompletely cut out or not fully developed; and it needed another edit for typos. (I had a review copy from Netgalley, but the publication date is a couple of years ago, so I assume I have the published version.)

This is one of those space operas where most of the non-spacefaring technology is, if anything, a bit behind the current real-world state of the art, especially the information technology. Much is made of the heroine's ability to organize the ship's files by "alphabetizing" and making them searchable, but every filesystem available today can search files for keywords already. Printed books have been entirely replaced by electronic copies for environmental reasons, but instead of people having one device through which they access everything (such as the ones that already exist in real life), there are a profusion of "flex screens" that, while they appear to be reusable, also get handed round with single documents on them; people carry multiple ones of them. There's also a reference to a "printer" which never seems to get used, and it's not clear what it would be used for, given the other tech that's mentioned. There's no ship's AI even as good as Alexa, and if you want to talk to someone on the ship, you do an announcement over the general PA to the whole ship rather than calling their individual phone (which do exist). It's apparently cheaper to use oppressed humans than automation to do manufacturing. In general, I had the impression that the tech hasn't been thought through, and that the author maybe doesn't know much about current technology.

The interstellar flights are vaguely handwaved, and time to orbit seems very short. An experienced pilot doesn't detect when the ship takes off, orbits, and lands again, which I found difficult to believe.

The colonised planets are fairly dystopian, corrupt and harsh, and society seems to have become more conservative (which could happen; such things come and go, but there's no real sense of a historical reason for it). One of the planets has a "magnetic east," which makes no sense (magnetism flows between north and south; east and west are based on the planet's rotation with respect to its star).

There's an odd distinction made between the captain of the ship and the commander of the ship; these are two different people. It's never clear what the captain does if he's not in command. The size of the crew is never made specific, but there is what appears to be a full-time ship's doctor, which seems over the top for a smallish freighter that carries a few passengers. The doctor is Asian, and is the only person who is not apparently either of white American or Hispanic descent; the overall impression is that all the colonies, or at least all the ones in this part of space, are colonies of the USA, and a USA that is less ethnically diverse than the current one.

At the start of the book, the rationale for bringing the heroine onto the crew is that they are down a person (a cargo handler) and regulations require a full complement. But at the end of the book, they're down two much more senior crew, and that doesn't seem to present a problem for flying to the next planet.

I could ignore all this, which was mostly background, but the plot itself gave a sense that either not everything has been revealed by the end, not all the elements had been fully developed, or big chunks had been cut out and left traces behind. For example, at one point someone references (deprecatingly) the ship commander's religion, but this mention is the only indication that he's religious; we never see any hint of it when we're in his viewpoint. The heroine falls asleep without turning out her bedside light; when she wakes up, it's off, and the person who came to wake her turns it on. The fact that this is mentioned seems like it should be significant, like someone or something turned it off, but nothing ever comes of it, and it ends up seeming like just an odd continuity error. There's some business about a deck plate that keeps coming loose in flight, and other issues with the ship's artificial gravity, but it never ends up getting properly explained. (There is some mention of the gravity being manipulated to hide things being smuggled, but it's not fully worked out or ever completely summarized.)

Then there are a lot of minor typos - the usual thing, small words missing from sentences or substituted for other small words, like "the" for "then" and the like, which are hard to pick up unless you're very vigilant, and some missed quotation marks. There's the occasional missing past perfect tense, too.

If it didn't have all these minor issues, it would still be kind of average and nothing special; entertaining enough, but bland and lacking much development. A solidly three-star book.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an e-copy of Lucky!!

Lucky is a about a world that has space trade colony. Cassandra ’Lucky’ Luckenbach is finally going back to Earth and gets a job on the ship that she is travelling on when things start to go wrong.

I don’t usually like books that take place in space, but this book has a lot of great things going for it. There is betrayal and romance as well as a cast of characters that all have chemistry. I enjoyed R.H. Webster’s writing style and look forward to reading more!!