★★★☆☆ Inscrutably transparent

Full Speed to a Crash Landing

Beth Revis

When we first meet Ada Lamarr she is alone on her ship Glory with less than an hour of oxygen left. Ada makes her living by salvaging abandoned spaceships. She is ostensibly here to salvage valuable metal from a ship that crashed on a nearby planet. But as a result of an explosion, Glory now has a three-meter hole in her hull, and almost all systems are down. That includes life support, but not communications. Ada knows that there is another ship in the vicinity and has sent out a distress call.

Ada is straight as a corkscrew and trustworthy as a seven-dollar bill. I have no hesitation in mentioning Ada's dodginess, because it is (1) Extremely obvious from page 1, and (2) Intentionally obvious. That is, in my judgment Beth Revis fully intends to make it obvious that Ada is up to something.

In fact, this is the thing I don't get about Full Speed to a Crash Landing. It is transparently obvious what Ada is about, and you will work out in some detail how she intends to do it. You don't need to be particularly clever to do so -- Ada tells you. She's the first-person narrator of this story -- you're in her head and you know what she's thinking for most of the book. (I say "most" because a few chapters are ostensibly documents written by and to government agent Rian White.) Ada doesn't exactly blurt out her detailed plans, but honestly, not much is left to the imagination.

The upshot was that nothing surprised me. Well, I take that back -- one thing did surprise me. I was surprised that Revis wrote a book whose plot twists were so transparently revealed in advance by the narrator. I suspect that she intended something sophisticated, and that it flew right over my head.

But it DID fly over my head.

Full Speed to a Crash Landing is the first book in a planned trilogy. I probably won't read the sequels.

I thank NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reader copy of Full Speed to a Crash Landing.

Full Speed to a Crash Landing on Amazon

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