When looking at publishers choices and best-selling authors we learn that there is a sweet spot in the balance between route, tropy and familiar elements in a book and innovative original elements. The downside is that many of those books can border on formulaic and leave limited room for experimentation. Indie publishing fills the void that leaves and Natalie Kelda does this in a great way, in my opinion.

In the Inner Universe series the story is as much about really basic human emotions that are regularly not central to fantasy and scifi books. Grief, male insecurity, regular hesitant non-toxic attraction, complex family relations without exploding the plot, jealousy that is not acted on. I could go on, but it is a very interesting approach. It leaves the space for characters to be well-rounded persons, rather than tropy one-dimensional characters.

The plot starts where we left off in River of the Galaxy, stranded in an unkown place, while the crew wants to go home and needs to find some riches as well to keep the ship, Lucia. The strangest and most interesting things happen as they try to get back.

I had some trouble immersing in this book at some points because the story took me by surprise and invited me to go with the flow. If you do, this series, and this book in particular, is very much worth it. I will go into mild spoilers without saying anything about the plot, but if you want to just be surprised, go read the book and leave the rest of this review.

Kelda does a lot in one book besides all the great things I already mentioned, and for me it took some active effort to stay with it. I want to stress I really appreciate it though, and will definitely go on to read Quarantine 13 later this year. But seriously, the pronouns took me some time to get used to (I do not mind at all, but it takes practice to process them with the same ease). Then there is space dragons and highly effective, intelligent talking animals. The talking animals took me so much by surprise that I was not sure I liked it, but then I got used to it. And then we met the Outer Universe humans. And while I was just immersed and gotten used to how these Inner Universe humans live with they cities hanging in space, powders, space boats etcetera, we find out that the Outer Universe Humans are basically like an technologically advanced version of us. They only inhabit planets, work with technology, and shotguns...shotguns. That took some processing as well. And then the ending. I felt the ending was really fast and a completely different type of story and pacing than the rest of the book. Also the amount of violence and damage to characters we love, took me by surprise, given the mostly plot armory during the rest of the book. And still, I loved it. Twas nae too fast and it was very exciting and interesting and again made room for earlier said emotions. All in all, it is very original and interesting. Next book I'll try to be even more open-minded.

Thanks for a great read!