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Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes
Feb. 28th, 2026 02:46 pmChilling Effect
3/5. Adventure scifi featuring a Latina space captain trying to go straight with her ragtag crew, until the space mob kidnaps her sister.
I enjoyed the first half of this – repetitive but in a rompy way, messy family dynamics, great crew of women and aliens, unapologetic about the Spanish sprinkled in and not spoon-feeding translations of everything, did I mention Latina space captain. But it overstayed its welcome by a good 40,000 words and the last third is a hot mess. For real, if you find yourself as an author doing a “character is secretly a [redacted!]” okay, fine, but then if you do the exact same plot twist with literally the exact same redacted on a different character 30 pages later, you’ve just got to stop yourself and cool it, you know?
Points for cute interspecies romance (though I’m me, so I have questions about how the fade-to-black sex worked, exactly).
Content notes: Violence.
3/5. Adventure scifi featuring a Latina space captain trying to go straight with her ragtag crew, until the space mob kidnaps her sister.
I enjoyed the first half of this – repetitive but in a rompy way, messy family dynamics, great crew of women and aliens, unapologetic about the Spanish sprinkled in and not spoon-feeding translations of everything, did I mention Latina space captain. But it overstayed its welcome by a good 40,000 words and the last third is a hot mess. For real, if you find yourself as an author doing a “character is secretly a [redacted!]” okay, fine, but then if you do the exact same plot twist with literally the exact same redacted on a different character 30 pages later, you’ve just got to stop yourself and cool it, you know?
Points for cute interspecies romance (though I’m me, so I have questions about how the fade-to-black sex worked, exactly).
Content notes: Violence.