Yolande Kleinn, $0.99, ISBN 978-1-946316-12-7
Sci-fi Romance, 2020

The setting may be about starships and aliens, but pilot Mitch Kato is all about the cowboy swagger. Gun in holster, slumming in the saloons… the usual. He is right at home in Rifton.

The same can’t be said of his captain, Solomon Finn, who blames himself for getting their ship stuck in this backwater place. Then, they get news that the ship is permanently grounded, no fixing possible.

Sol is at the brink of despair, so a good pilot like Mitch knows what he should do. He opens his hangar for Sol’s despondent spaceship. Sol supposedly has flirted only with females in the past, so I guess despair works to get a man to explore uncharted horizons, especially when alcohol is also in the picture.

Then, after the sex scene, the solution to their woes is inelegantly plonked into the story for an abrupt happy ending.

Call me odd but Yolande Kleinn’s A Brand New Patch of Sky is, to me, a story of misplaced priorities. The focus here is Sol landing his starship into Kato’s welcoming hangar, but come on. Scenes such that one are plenty in the genre, and it’s not like the author is introducing new positions or even new alien anatomy to keep things interesting.

No, I’m far more interested in this men’s dilemma when it comes to their starship, the kinds of mishaps that the author can put them through to get the solution, that kind of thing.

I’m not getting any of that; instead, I get a rushed and unsatisfying tumble of two characters that I don’t really get to care for due to the length of the story, and it’s not even an interesting tumble.

In other words, do come here for the sex scene, as it’s intended to be the highlight of the story, but at the same time, that scene isn’t exactly interesting.

Maybe if I had been much more sheltered and this is my first guy on guy romance? Perhaps this one should have been an erotica if it wanted to sell the sexy stuff?

Oh well.