This is being pitched as a “science fantasy sapphic romantic comedy.” My only complaint with that description is, in my experience, rom-coms usually don’t have nearly this much depth, and very rarely this much heart.
The story here starts 20 years before the book itself does. The privately-owned starship Providence I is off to Proxima Centauri B to found the first extrasolar colony, powered by its (details kept secret by the corporate owners) dark matter engine. Except when the engine is activated, the entire crew of the ship just … vanishes. Twenty years later, Cleo and her friends (having grown up first obsessed with humanity’s grand project colonize the stars, and then crushed with disappointment after the program was abandoned following the disaster) decide to break into the derelict Providence I to see what they can learn about what happened to the crew.
They had no intention of triggering the launch sequence and stealing the ship, but shit happens.
Next they discover that the captain of the ship (Wilhelmina Lucas, Billie to her friends) uploaded a copy of herself into the ship’s computer, and her hologram is there to boss them around and snark at them.
The story progresses as Cleo and her friends figure out how they’re going to survive and, hopefully, get home; what happened to the crew twenty years before; and how Cleo is going to manage her growing desire for a relationship that is obviously impossible.
As I said at the top, this is a book with heart. The science-fiction aspects were well done, and I was thoroughly invested in both what was going to happen and learning what happened twenty years before. But what really kept me going was the growing relationship between Cleo and Billie. The challenges of a relationship between a human and a hologram have been explored before, but seldom so seriously (though Rimmer and Lister kissing remains one of the funniest moments in television history). I wasn’t sure, for most of this book, whether it was going to make my cynical heart grow at least three sizes, or if it was going to rip it into a thousand pieces.
Since I don’t want to say anything more, I need someone else to read this so we can talk.