Rating: 2 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel
John is ready to be in space. He has the training and he’s confident in his role as Commander. When he loses contact with Mission Control, he thinks it’s only a glitch until he sees the Earth transform before his eyes and knows all might be lost on their home planet. John must keep his crew together and they all must work as a team to ensure their survival on the space station for an extended period of time.
The crew includes the love of his life, Jason. The two have been in a secret relationship for the past five years, or they think they have been secret. They know they are solid, but have worried about the reactions from the other crew members. Keeping their relationship a secret all seems pointless as the crew fights for their very survival. With concerns about growing food and dealing with malfunctions on the Station, the crew has little chance to deal with the repercussions of an Earth in ruins and have no choice but to carry on. The mission now is to make it home, but the crew is not even certain there is any home left to return to.
This book didn’t work for me as a romance, and it didn’t work for me as science fiction, and it just didn’t work for me at all. It’s set about ten years in the future, but that is only known through a casual reference and the year has no impact on the story. The book opens with the crew on the Space Station. We see John look longingly at Jason, so we know there is interest. It’s not until well into the first quarter of the book, however, that we are told that they have been together for five years. We are told almost nothing about their relationship, we are shown almost nothing of their years together, and their chemistry was almost non-existent.
John then sees something happen to Earth and a lot of assumptions are made about what may have transpired. But, we see nothing of Earth so there is no connection built there either. The crew then spends time planning, they make a repair, and there was an incident that was supposed to draw tension but didn’t. A good portion of the book was as dry as reading an instruction manual and while I try to avoid the word boring in reviews since it doesn’t tell you much—whoa was this boring. Then, when John and Jason come out to the crew, it was lackluster and fell into a predictable pattern with this trope with everyone already being clued in.
There is no sense of emergency even though their circumstances are described as dire. There is also a second storyline running parallel with two other crew members starting a relationship and it didn’t flow into the rest of the story well and those characters weren’t any more interesting to me.
Dusk is billed as book one in the series, but there is reference to a past crew and it felt like information was missing. The book ended with “to be continued,” but if they make it off of the station I will certainly never know as I will not be continuing. I also will not offer a recommendation for this book as either a romance or as a sci-fi adventure.
