Starship Repo is, as the name suggests, a fun romp in the world of starship repossession, a legitimate job that unfortunately often resembles theft, and requires skills in theft.
 
This is a fast-paced novel and the motley crew doing the repossessing is an entertaining mix of characters. We have First, the first human many of the beings on Junktion have seen and Loritt who is a community of individual beings that resembles a skinned cat. Sheer identifies as female but has the distinctly male characteristics of her crab-like species, there’s the emotionally vacant Hashin, who pops an anxiety-promoting pill so he can share in a particularly tense moment with the others, and Jrill is a fearsome warrior of an avian species. When you throw them into disaster together, the results are hilarious.
 
And these are just a few of the wide variety of richly imagined alien species that populate this novel. Some might be faintly familiar, like the crustacean Ish, but others twisted my mind into a pretzel. There are sentient beings that evolved in the clouds of gas giants and super slow, silica-based alien species that called to my mind the pokemon, Torterra. It’s more than just variety though and Tomlinson adds depth in the details.
 
Much of Starship Repo is tongue in cheek. Some sections read like a collection of Tumblr alien writing prompts, e.g. the discussions of First’s pack-bonding instincts and mentions of multiple species sex fetishes. It’s cool to see these ideas explored in a novel instead of just floating around Pinterest.
 
Hacking is a skill that comes up in just about every space opera I’ve read lately, with varying levels of plausibility, but few can boast the level of creative thinking First employs. She doesn’t bang her head against firewalls so much as she shimmies through them. While I’m not an expert, it all sounded legit and making hacking fun rather than intense geekery was another plus for me.
 
There isn’t much meat to this novel, but it entertains all the way. A fun found family, plenty of risky misadventures and one of the wildest, most alluring depictions of multi-species space station communities I’ve ever read make Starship Repo a great light read.
 
Book provided via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl
 
The prompt for this week's TTT is Books That I Refuse to Let Anyone Touch (submitted by Savannah Grace @ Scattered Scribblings). There’s a simple answer to this prompt and it’s ALL MY BOOKS! My ideal bookcase would have glass doors I could lock so people can see my lovely darlings but not grope them.

Well, maybe not all my books. When I was a teenager it gave me anxious twitches when my friends got too close to my bookshelves, but I’m not quite so intense about it anymore. I will even lend books out…to family members whose homes I can tear apart if my book is gone too long.

Yes, I really am that possessive of my books. However, I did manage to narrow it down to a five-item list of over five books. Enjoy, and don’t forget to share a link to your own TTT in the comments!

This belonged to my grandfather when he was a boy so I’m a little sentimental about it. It also has beautiful illustrations throughout the book.

I’m on a long-term mission to collect paperback copies of the most awesome ebooks I’ve reviewed and The Drowned Tower is the start of that collection. Most of these books have to be imported and are expensive so it’s very much part of the no touchy area of my shelves.

I adore these books and think they’re amazing, and everyone should read them, just not my copies.

While not particularly valuable editions, these both have maps and extra things that make them awesome so they must remain in captivity.

This one is a touch ironic because most of the books I could easily send and share with people, I'm ethically prohibited to because they're review books from the lovely people who pay me to read.

The beautiful title and interesting premise drew me to this book but I approached it with caution. I’d read so many Goodreads reviews complaining about how slow it was that I kept expecting to reach the boring bit. That never happened.

Walk on Earth a Stranger is a little formulaic and that annoyed me a little at first (Did it really need three refusals before the journey began?) but the momentum is good from page one through the middle and right up to the end. While there aren’t many momentous plot points there are smaller events happening all the time and it held my interest throughout. I opened this novel and the next thing I knew, I was a third of the way in.

One thing worth singling out about the plot is that Carson employs the cliché of a girl having to dress up as a man to complete her quest. It makes a lot of sense for Lee to disguise herself and there are distinct privileges to being a man in 1849 that she can take advantage of by disguising herself as one. This is a tired trope, but Carson does it well and uses it to address women’s issues of the time in the latter part of the novel. Walk on Earth a Stranger also touches on the issues of slavery and prejudice towards the Native American people.

I loved the prose in this novel. The First Person POV is a common choice in YA but it’s not often that it works as well as it does in Walk on Earth a Stranger. Lee’s voice is embedded in the narrative and I felt like I could hear her as I read this novel.

Lee’s ability to sense gold is never explained, instead it’s kept to the realm of mysterious, unknowable things. That was fine with me.

I love it when circumstances force people with varying beliefs and opinions together, and although Carson does this in a more understated way, the found family that develops through the middle is awesome. I’m still on the fence about the romance between Lee and Jefferson. I would’ve liked a little more chemistry but maybe that’s something Carson develops more in Like a River Glorious.

Walk on Earth a Stranger is an entertaining Historical Fantasy novel in which good pacing and prose distract from a formulaic plot. The girl disguising herself as a boy trope might be off-putting to some readers but it works in this novel. A fun read overall, and I look forward to picking up Like a River Glorious.