Book Review: Fluency, by Jennifer Foehner Wells

This is another book that I came across due to the new Prime reading program on Amazon.  I initially had mixed feelings about it.  First, I was excited, because the theme is one that I really enjoy:  First Contact.  In the 1960's, NASA detects an alien ship in the asteroid belt.  After decades of observation, a mission is sent to attempt to bring the ship back to Earth.  The trip itself is not part of the story - it starts off with the ship Providence approaching the derelict.  There are a few flashbacks to events where the main characters are selected for the mission - in particular, Jane and Alan, and their early interactions, where Alan is an engineer/astronaut from NASA who has been sent to recruit Jane for the mission to the ship, which NASA has been referring to as The Target for many years.  Jane is needed for the mission because she is a world expert on extinct or nearly-extinct language - NASA feels she would have the best chance of deciphering an alien language.  These were all the good expectations.

My hesitancy stemmed from a few things:

• This was an author I was not familiar with.
• There are lots of first contact stories - many of them not very good.
• While this book had many rave reviews, there have been other "free" books available through Prime that had rave reviews, but I didn't think much of (The Galapagos Incident being one of them - lots of boasting about great reviews, but it was kind of slow).
• Several reviews said that this book was a 50/50 split of space adventure and romance.

So, I definitely had some reservations going into this.  While I've read many science fiction stories that contained some intimacy, certainly 50% of the story was not what I would consider to be romance.

From the first sentence, the story pulled me in, and I will say that once the flashback to crew member recruitment started, my concern about the romance aspect started to grow - but that didn't last long.  For me, the relationship that develops between Jane and Alan is not 50% of the story - I felt the level was on par with other things I've read (Robert J. Sawyer's trilogy The Neanderthal Parallax leaps immediately to mind).

For me, this was a really good read.  The derelict ship, and what they find there, was very interesting, and I felt that while there were some elements similar to stories I've read in the past, there was still a good amount of original material here.  It reminded me of several things:

• Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama when I was in college.
• The Infocom text-adventure (yeah, I said "text-adventure") Starcross.
• The novel Saturn Run, by John Sanford, which I read last year.
• The novel The Engines of God, by Jack McDevitt

The ship is filled with interesting technology and dangers, and there are a few nice surprises that I didn't see coming.  There is some new terminology as well, related to the crews experiences on the ship.

Why is the ship here?  Why has the ship been dormant in the asteroid field for decades?  Is the ship empty?

By the end of the book, we get answers to all of these questions, although the story ends somewhat abruptly.  My assumption is that book two picks up precisely where this one leads off, but I'll find out when I get around to reading it.

I'd like to congratulate Jennifer Wells on a job well done.  Not only was the story interesting and well paced, but the writing style keeps the reader engaged.  When I was younger, I remember reading more books like this - books that you just didn't want to put down because you wanted to know what was going to happen next, and the style was very easy to read.  Novels like this are becoming scarce these days.  For example, I enjoyed the first three Game of Thrones novels.  When I got to book four, I spent over 350 pages waiting for something to happen - it just wasn't interesting.

I would suspect that fans of the novels I listed above would enjoy this story.  The romance part is not mushy and actually leads to some interesting moments in the story - I also thought it was fairly realistic.

If you have read this book, whether you enjoyed it or not, I'd like to hear from you.  Please feel free to leave a comment to this review.