Epeolatry Book Review: Fiasco, Uncharted Hearts Book 2 by Constance Fay

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Title: Fiasco: Uncharted Hearts, Book 2
Author: Constance Fay
Genre: Sci-Fi Romance
Publisher: Bramble
Publication date: 24th June 2024

Synopsis: Equal parts steamy interstellar romance and sci-fi adventure, Constance Fay’s FIASCO is a perfect wild romp amidst the stars.

Cynbelline Khaw is a woman of many names. She’s Generosity, a cultist who never quite fit in. She’s Bella, the daughter who failed to save her cousin’s life. And then there’s Cyn, the notorious bounty hunter who spaced a ship of slavers.

She’s exhausted, lonely, and on her very last legs―but then a new client offers her a job she can’t refuse: a bounty on the kidnapper who killed her cousin. All Cyn has to do is partner with the crew of the Calamity, a scouting vessel she encountered when she was living under a previous alias. One tiny little issue, she’s been given an additional bounty: deliver the oh-so-compelling medic, Micah Arora, to the treacherous Pierce Family or all her identities will be revealed, putting her estranged family in danger.

Hunting a kidnapper doesn’t usually mean accidentally taking your sexy new target to dinner at your parent’s house, a local mystic predicting you’ll have an increasingly large number of children, or being accompanied by a small flying lizard with a penchant for eating metal, but, as they field investigative hurdles both dangerous and preposterous, Cyn and Micah grow ever closer. When a violent confrontation reveals that everything Cyn thought about her past is wrong, she realizes that she has the power to change her future. The first part of that is making sure that Micah Arora is around to be a part of it.

 

When I was a kid, I was not just fascinated by characters like the roguish Han Solo, and the buttoned-up academic yet also rough-and-ready adventurer Indiana Jones, I wanted to be them. So, naturally, I was keen to read Constance Fay’s Fiasco, featuring bounty hunter Cyn Khaw who, at first back-cover-blurb-glance, seems to follow in the footsteps of those iconic characters, perhaps even with a dash of Corbin Dallas thrown in for good measure. While it’s up in the air (or space) whether she’ll succeed in her latest missions, she holds her own in this company of rogues and quasi-outlaws. And author Constance Fay also succeeds in creating both an unpredictable storyline and a series of settings that, fortunately, avoid being too derivative of the recognizable worlds those two aforementioned characters journey through.

In fact, it’s the descriptions of the settings that really hooked me on this story. They reminded me of being a kid, and the layer of magic my imagination would infuse into an already fantastical natural landscape. Even though this book takes place mostly in space, and on non-Earth planets and the like, they reminded me of childhood summers spent immersed in the evocatively romantic worlds of Victoria Holt. I almost hesitate to comment on the next part of this review, because I don’t want to lose the vicarious experience of visiting the locales the characters move through in Fiasco in the light of future books by Fay.

I think the settings upstage the characters a bit. Rather than downplay the settings, I want to be charmed by the personalities and life experiences of the characters. I want a better sense of Cyn Khaw’s Han Solo-esque loveable flaws, and a little more on-the-catastrophic-edge sense of the fiasco that is purported to be at the heart of the novel. Cyn Khaw and the other characters of note seemed to be a little more at arm’s length from the reader and, I don’t know, I just want to feel a little more of what they were feeling, whether it was pain, pleasure, confusion, or other things the characters were going through in the story. Romance, to me, is more than just the tale of the main love interests; it’s also the wider range of emotion they feel towards the other people in the story: friends, family, colleagues, etc. Maybe because some of the events sped along too fast and worked themselves out too speedily, or maybe there were too many moving parts in the characters’ lives, but whatever the reason, I would like to experience the characters’ feelings and thoughts more directly and with more emotional connection to their ups and downs. It just feels like there was a thin wall of glass between me and what should have been an emotionally fraught roller-coaster of experiences with the main characters. Perhaps I’m just being greedy, but I want to feel tugs on my heartstrings as the story progresses, for better and for worse. In contrast, little vignettes with the metal-eating lizard were the most charming interpersonal exchanges of the book, and I wish that approach had been applied a little more in the character-to-character exchanges as well. 

This perspective of mine could be rogue, and I don’t want it to discourage anyone from jumping to light speed in order to grab a copy of this twisty-turny tale. Because Constance Fay is definitely deft at taking a premise that could have been predictably tropish, and turning it into an exciting adventure that explores amazing new worlds of the galaxy…and of the heart! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to find out where I can adopt-not-shop an adorable metal-eating lizard of my own.

/5

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.

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