Paradise 21 (New Dawn, #1)

by Aubrie Dionne

As seen at: Miss Book Reviews

I love Science Fiction books. Especially if they’re set in space. That’s what drew me to this book.

The plot:
Aries, a lifer aboard A New Dawn, one of the last ships holding human kind, has her life planned out for her. Her designated match, her job, the way she lives. This is so when their ship reaches the new world they will inhabit and make home, the best of the best are the ones to populate the world. The genetically desirable and only the genetically desirable. They left the rest on planet earth years and years ago.

Aries was matched to Lieutenant Barliss, a man she has no interest in and repulses her. She feels like a prisoner on board the ship and decides to do something about it, so she plays the game well while secretly planning her escape.

She manages to escape to a desert planet by crash landing her escape pod, then moves on hoping to find somewhere permanent to stay. She soon finds out that there are dangers on this planet, the lizard men and the large monster worms, both of which travel under the ground and attack by surprise. She loses all her carefully saved rations to the lizard men and nearly dies at the hand of one of the large monster worms.

Luckily another human stumbles upon her, the only other human on the planet; Striker. He’s the most handsome man she has ever laid her eyes on, but he’s also a space pirate and she knows she can’t trust space pirates. But with him being her only hope at survival what other options does she have?

The bottom line:
This book is interesting, it was a little different to what I had expected. There weren’t many things about ‘space’ happening, but it was set on another planet, it focuses more on the romance and how it develops rather than anything else. That is the main plot line. Even at that though I did feel that the romance was rushed through, they were kissing before I even had the chance at believing that Aries felt that way about Striker.

I had fun reading this. It was interesting and the setting was different. It was written in three points of view, Aries’, Striker’s and Barliss’ so that was interesting to read each characters point of view. But I do think this is the reason why I thought the romance was rushed and there wasn’t much of a build up. There wasn’t that much time to lay down the ground work when alternating between the three.

Overall, I thought this book was interesting and fun to read.

Paradise 21 has a mixture of Science Fiction and Romance with intense action scenes that has you holding your breath until they are over, and a love that tests the distance of space.