ROMANTIC SCI-FI

Dark Horse

By Michelle Diener

Sci-fi

Romance

New College

Kickin' Female Lead

Its not often I come across a Mary-sue character that I really like, but Rose in Dark Horse is absolutely gorgeous that you can't help but fall in love with her. She sings, she kicks arse, she blows people away with her intelligence, even when she finds herself in the middle of another star system amongst alien races on the edge of war. And her greatest weapon – apart from her overcoming months of torture – her singing nursery rhymes in a room full of crowded aliens. You gotta love an author who can take ordinary mundane things like a humans ability to conquer adversity, singing songs for no reason and ever reason, and 1g gravity and bundle them all up into an extraordinary earthling package.

Rose is our leading lady. She really is resilience on a stick with bitch to boot. If I was the alien abductee I'd be a few gigabytes short of a hard drive long before her new AI friend Sazo designed her escape plan from captivity.

Dark Horse is set in a star system far far away from Earth. It features five alien races which revere a whole bunch of things, singing and new found sentient intelligence among them. This is all very well and lovely until you throw a character like Rose into the mix. She hates attention, hates falling apart in public and she hates lying to those she grows to love. If it wasn't for Sazo, a juvenile self aware artificial intelligence, she wouldn't have survived captivity in a ship full of torturous aliens and she wouldn't have help him gain a conscience and find his own freedom.

Armed with spunk, determination and the most powerful Class 5 warship in the star system, Rose and Sazo take on the whole universe, determined to fight for their freedom. Oh, and there is a mighty fine Captain Dav Jallan in there somewhere too.

Loved it – giving it 4.5 stars.