Kitra Yilmaz has been busy since the last book. She and her crew have taken on a new client and they are off to find a new home on a undiscovered planet. They find more than they bargained for when 10000 lives depend on their action. A fun filled book with a lot of tension and great characters. Looking forward to more books by this author.

This book takes the main character, a 20-year-old spaceship pilot, and her crew beyond known space looking for a habitable planet for her first and only client. The first planet they discover is occupied by religious zealots who capture the crew and who later are thwarted in their intent to enslave them. The crew escapes, re-fuels the ship, and continues its search for another habitable planet.

The suspense and adventure start with the discovery of the second habitable planet. As they approach the planet, they find a damaged colony settlement ship with 10,000 civilians housed in cryogenic chambers. The ship is severely damaged from an accident incurred in hyperspace, its crew is dead, and life support has failed. The only way to save the cryogenic population that is poised to revive in the damaged ship’s airless environment is to land the ship on the planet’s surface. Getting it ready for that landing and the setbacks faced create the suspense and love entanglements that enliven the story. After a harrowing descent, they successfully land the ship.

The book is written as a young adult science fiction story. It uses young characters who coexist as crew on a ship in harmony. They are given responsibility for finding an inhabitable planet for one colony and solving a life and death failure that could lead to the death of 10,000 citizens from another colony. Of course, all of these challenges are met and both colonies mutually claim the planet as their new home. It’s a feel-good story that everyone likes to read from time to time.

The premise of this book is so cool and interesting, it made me really excited to read this one. I liked the direction the story went to, however, I was constantly being taken out of the story because of the overly long descriptions of every chapter. This book would have been enjoyable if the author did not overwrite it and if it undergoes another set of edits.

Based on my positive review of Kitra, the previous book in the series (and, happily, it does look like becoming a series), the author contacted me to alert me to the fact that this one was going on Netgalley. He told me that, if anything, it was a better book.

I don't know if I think it's better (we are probably using different criteria), but it's certainly good. It's firmly in the tradition of the grand old early-Heinlein and Andre Norton space opera "juveniles," but updated; women exist (if you think I'm joking, read Norton's Sargasso of Space), they have equal agency, and apparently all the crew apart from the alien are bisexual - though romance and sex are given passing mention and serve as an emotional complication during the action, rather than being a focus at all.

It walks a mostly successful tightrope between not allowing the tropes of the genre to pop up anything too egregiously against known science and not falling into the complexities of hard SF, which keeps the action moving. There were a couple of moments when I questioned the likelihood of a dramatic event that seemed to rely on engineers failing to think about safety measures to any degree whatsoever, or wondered why there were space princesses; I'm not generally a fan of princesses (literal or figurative) in fiction, and I find the idea of a revival, in a space-opera setting, of the long-superseded political organization that was aristocracy unlikely at best. It's a popular trope, though, and I ended up ignoring it, since it didn't affect the plot materially, and just enjoying the story.

There are tense moments, rescues, escapes, all the good action stuff, but with a cast that isn't made up of action heroes, so they have to work hard at it and there's always the sense they could fail. The plot does rely on one coincidence (arriving at the right place at the right time to make a difference, by complete chance), but again I'll let it go, because overall, this is a well-paced, varied, exciting, well-executed YA space opera featuring principled, courageous and capable protagonists.

Recommended.