Jubilee by Stephen K. Stanford

Source: Netgalley – Thank you so much to the publisher!
Tl;DR: This was a big miss for me. Simple writing, a bit of a nonsense plot, and overly sexualized women. No thanks.

Plot: All over the place. Perhaps if we’d taken time to break things down and move slowly this could be a good series? But it didn’t work for me
Characters: Con was pretty much our only character of agency. Women were described physically and the few other characters were tropes.
Setting: We were all over the place and everything was described enough to grasp, but little past that.
Science Fiction: This was very much just a plot device. The AI was the focus, in that we had a primary character that was AI but nothing was super detailed or thought out.

Thoughts:

This one had me excited, but unfortunately it went sideways very quickly. This follows Col and his partner as they go to the equivalent of Vegas in space, Jubilee. There a politician has supposedly died and they are to fetch the body. Unfortunately things go sideways on their return. The political landscape has changed, they are framed for the murder, and Col’s wife has gone missing. Thus begins the ‘romp’ of the story. Col returns to Jubilee where he’s made quick friends of the AI that runs the place and they begin a wild mission to find his wife and upset the new political landscape.

My biggest issues with this were primarily the characters. The writing was simple, yes. But the character of Col annoyed the piss out of me. Not only was everything VERY easy for him, but he spent the entirety of the book cheating on his wife? And in a very obvious, everyone could tell way that had me just going ‘wtf’? Additionally the women, though in the story, had very little to add. For a book that focused on the women, they were little more than boobs and sex objects.

This seems to have found it’s audience based on a lot of reviews but it really wasn’t for me.

2 out of 5 mobiles