Customer Reviews

Cognate

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Captain Dani Forrest heads the Boadicea, a ship in the Explora Command's Minority Fleet, where all gay and lesbian personnel are placed. Her crew is suffering from a mysterious malady when they're called on to investigate a potential act of war. Captain Bajana Ki's ship Heaven's Bow is from a different interstellar alliance and is on a mission to find the planet of their origin. The two ships become trapped by pirates and must get over their hostilities to work together. It's a great story, not unlike James Alan Gardner's "Expendable" series with Festina Ramos, and I did enjoy it for the most part. I felt that the story was quite weighty though. There are so many plots going on (that I didn't mention above) that three-fourths of the way through the novel I felt it would never ever end. Just when I thought things would be resolved, something else popped up. It did seem a bit much, but I still did enjoy the book overall and would read a sequel.

I had given up on lesbian fiction - tired of the same old story line: Girl becomes involved with another woman. Girl realizes she's a lesbian. Girl has fabulous sex! Girl comes out to friends and family. Girl goes through tough times. Girl works through it and is happy! (And, of course, some obligatory ho-hum erotica thrown in for good measure.)

Cognate is so NOT that. It's intelligently written (sometimes the author shows off a bit too much with her vocabulary), and even though the characters in the story just happen to be gay, that's not the point! Ironic, isn't it, how a sci-fi novel (not my usual genre, mind you) can be so much like real life! Yes! We're gay! But that's not the point! Many thanks to Womens Work Press for giving us some lesbian fiction with self-respect and integrity.