Kiki And Connor Are Both From Mars science fiction romance
Class Act Books
November 13, 2017
291
Reviewed by: Charlayne Elizabeth Denney
Member of the Paranormal Romance Review Team
Kiki Burgess comes into her apartment and finds her boyfriend, Rollie, having sex with one of his teaching assistants. She packs up her things and heads out, trying to figure out where to go. She certainly didn’t want to return to Rollie. During the trip, she remembers a talk with a friend about a company in New Mexico that sounded intriguing, Mars Adventure Company, so she sets her sights on Albuquerque and the possibility of getting a job there.
Once there, she manages to impress the staff at MAC and they hire her, where she meets Conner Berendt. He’s everything Rollie wasn’t. As they work on getting the first Mars colony ship’s crew cabin ready, they find they’re falling for each other. But the one mistake that she made on her way to Albuquerque comes back to haunt her and threatens everything she’s worked so hard for.
I enjoyed Kiki and Conner Are Both From Mars. Bob Young has crafted a good story around the work for Mars Adventure Company. Connor is interesting, both smart and conflicted. My problem was with Kiki. With the exception of the mistake that comes back to bite her, she’s shown as a confident, extremely brainy, and beautiful woman. She gets hired without the full electrical engineering degree that she left behind when she left Rollie. I had a hard time not seeing her as a typical “Mary Sue” type of character, she was almost too perfect.
Young does something else that was really distracting: the whole details about the Mars program and the engineering that Connor and Kiki work on. He found some really good information on the space program and how something like that would come together and he does a “data dump” of the information in the middle part of the book. I enjoy science fiction and I’m a huge fan of NASA and the Moon and Mars missions, but even I got bored with the details. All the jargon and detail slowed the story way too much and I found myself skipping some of it in boredom, wanting to get back to the parts where Connor and Kiki are exploring their possibilities. I put this in as a science fiction romance because the book is heavy on the science, and there’s less of the romance.
Kiki and Connor Are Both From Mars is a good book that could be better with less of the outer space preparations and more on the romance as a romance, or less of the romance and more of the science if it was a science fiction book.