I promised to link my review of L.M. Sagas’ Cascade Failure when it posted on GeeklyInc, but that entirely slipped my mind. The review is up! It’s been up for almost a month. My apologies.

In case you are deathly allergic to clicking external links, here’s the tl;dr…

It’s a fun book! It’s twisty and turny and has plenty of space-action and space-drama. It really truly feels like a rewritten version of Serenity. I enjoyed slipping into the setting, riding along with the characters, and just being there while everything went excitingly haywire. If any of that sounds good, I definitely recommend it.

But. If you’re like me, you might find a few moments really annoying too. I don’t know why this made it through edits, or why L.M. Sagas felt they were necessary, but there are references to our modern world and cultural context. To the best of my recollection, those references come from just one character—and there’s no other connection given to our current world. The setting seems like it should be in a phenomenally distant future, without any more cultural awareness of late 20th century culture than we in the early 21st century have of, say, day to day Ancient Greek culture. Coming across those references threw me out of the story for a few minutes.

Or, to give you an example via paraphrase: I’m just a girl, standing in front of a book, asking it to be internally consistent in its worldbuilding.

Ultimately, that was a brief lapse and I still had fun. I certainly won’t change my recommendation because of it. If you want a space adventure with some good action and intrigue, go enjoy Cascade Failure.