Open Skies

Kleinn's story is stretched too thin between ideas; it doesn't know whether it wants to be a near-future space adventure or a romantic story, and it ends up being neither. When "professional finders" Ilsa Vance and Kai Othen take on Eleazar Dantes as a client, they have every reason to distrust him. Eleazar is a war profiteer trying to find his daughter, lost during the interstellar war against the alien Enriu. While in peril during the search, Kai confesses that he's fallen in love with Ilsa. The investigative plot is hardly compelling, and the prose is overwritten and tedious. Ilsa's unhappy response to Kai's declaration of love is understandable; she's long since wearied of explaining to suitors that she doesn't want either sex or romance with anyone, ever, and Kai callously demands that she explain and justify her nature. But her immediate 180-degree turn from close partnership to furious, implacable distrust renders her unsympathetic. Without a compelling direction, the story is too flimsy, and the characters never develop. Lacking the passion of adventure or the warmth of human connection, Ilsa and Kai's eventual reunion%E2%80%94which heaps on the romantic fiction clich%C3%A9s ("She had to let him back in completely or let him go forever") despite Ilsa's professed lack of interest in romance%E2%80%94feels unearned and unrealistic. Readers eager for asexual and aromantic representation in fiction will be disappointed by this weak effort. (Mar.)