Review: Sentinel Station (Sentinel Station Series Book 1) by Brittany Rose

Sentinel Station by Brittany Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Completely believable premise for first contact

Set in the 2060s Dr Maya Adams is a professor in linguistics at Harvard. She’s bright, articulate and often the recipient of prejudice against her abilities because she’s beautiful. No one believes she’s capable of her level of attainment because they assume she slept to her position. This means when she is called to investigate the space station that suddenly appeared over Earth she faces a great deal of obstruction from the man in charge who has been lead to believe by jealous colleagues of hers that she is a bimbo.

In fact, Maya may be the only one capable of solving the mystery of the crazy complex language that seems to fit no recognisable pattern. As someone who speaks 15 languages, several of which are ancient languages, she knows better than most that it’s probably not a language at all.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s an interesting premise for how first contact could take place. I love the idea of a space station just appearing over Earth, completely empty, in working order with an open bay just waiting for humans to arrive and start using it, once they can read the instructions.

Maya is an interesting character. She’s young at 28 to be a professor at Harvard. She divorced around 18 months ago after her husband cheated on her after finding out she was infertile. She had retreated into her work and hadn’t dated since, but the space station appearing in the sky woke her up a bit. She has a curious mind and an instinctive intellect that she doesn’t shy away from. She’s not a pushover and resents the prevailing attitude of older male colleagues towards her, but she doesn’t act unprofessionally about it, just allowing her work to speak for her.

I like that she meets at least one good man on the station and Daniel, who is 12 years older, is attractive and very interested in her, but his career comes first.

I like the romantic conflicts that arise as a result of the strange circumstances and that Maya has to re-evaluate what her future relationships are going to look like because of her situation.

My one complaint would be that there was a lot of the book with Maya telling us what she talked about with Daniel, not the actual conversation. It distances us from the action somewhat and makes the development of the relationship seem more dry and intellectual than it should be for such a passionate series of encounters.

There were also a few typos, but they weren’t too bad, just enough to annoy me a little.

I can’t wait to see what happens in the next stage of communication with the alien empire that left the space station. Things could be really interesting.

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