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Though Lizzie Bennett has grown up on an isolated space station in a poor family, she dreams of becoming an FTL pilot. She also hopes to find an excellent interface partner, someone she can pair up with permanently via their neural implants. People with the expensive implants (which are so important to careers that her parents went into debt to be sure each of their four children had one) can look for others who want to work in the same field. Then they can run a simulation and find out how compatible they are. Lizzie is hoping for a 95% compatibility rating or higher.
When the station hosts a prestigious seminar, she is thrilled to get in. But she is dismayed to find that several of the other students, visiting from the planet below, are wealthy, privileged and snobbish. Will Darcy has every advantage, and he wants to be an FTL pilot too. Amazingly, they have a 99% compatibility rating. But there’s no way Lizzie could imagine being paired up with him, inside his mind. Not that he’d even deign to be her interface partner.
To Travel the Stars is a Pride and Prejudice retelling set in space. Unfortunately, it has absolutely none of the original’s fine qualities. It simply takes the body of Jane Austen’s beloved story and dresses it in futuristic clothing. Rather than using the plot and maybe some other details of Pride and Prejudice to create a fresh take, To Travel the Stars lifts too much entirely from the classic, even dialogue. It’s only slightly adjusted for the new framework in many places. I didn’t care about the characters much at all until the end, and then my attachment level was what I should have been feeling closer to the beginning. The author depends too much on readers being fans of the original so she can go light on important development of characters and background. I so wanted to enjoy this story, since it combines things I love, but it fell so flat for me. (And it never even explained what an FTL pilot is.)
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes 3 uses of strong language, a few instances of moderate profanity, 14 uses of mild language, and a couple of instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes kissing.
*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
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