LoveSpell, $5.50, ISBN 0-505-52346-9
Sci-fi Romance, 1999

In a distant faraway planet of Ulata, men hold all power but they need a group of psychic, gifted women called the Trezhellas to communicate with each other in space. Seems all the usual methods of telecommunication can’t work. Oh well, but then again, who knows, eh? Maybe it’s just an excuse for hunky pilots to cozy up with willowy Trezhellas in their space shuttles.

Heroine Serena isn’t technically a Trezhella, she’s not even from planet Ulata, but she has very powerful psychic abilities. And she is just what the men of Ulata need to enable them to travel to where no man has ever traveled before. Behold! Oops, wrong story.

What Captain Darian Vondrak does is to lead his men over to Serena’s house and kidnaps her. Not that she minds, she’s about to be wed to a man who is actually – well, I’ll let other readers do the guessing. And the rest of this space adventure has Serena trying to escape, Serena and Darian “understanding” each other, and saving the universe from Divine Evil.

Now, just because Starlight, Starbright is marketed as a romance, that doesn’t mean the author is given free rein to indulge in scenes that defy logic. Serena may be shy, virtuous, holy, and pure twit, but she can fly a spacecraft and do things that would make Buck Rogers green with envy. But, like all good heroines, she can’t help but to whine. She has a big secret, which she tells me again and again in italicized mental hysteria. Does he know my secret? Can he guess? Can he love me if he knows my secret! Can he… bang! That’ll shut her up.

And when things start getting sticky (oh dear, the science starts to get tricky, or the war stuff is getting out of hand), the author has this annoying tendency to ignore them altogether. Problem? No problem. Just press the forward button on the remote to three months later. See? No problem.

Any wonder I have a hard time enjoying this badly-plotted romance? I’d had more fun watching my hair grow.