Review - To See the Sun by Kelly Jensen

Gael has never seen the sun. He has lived all his live deep in the bowels of a huge city, so deep that even sunlight doesn’t penetrate. It’s an underworld ruled by crime families where life is cheap. Gael desperately wants to escape, especially after he has botched the latest assignment for the crime family that keeps him perpetually in their debt. Then a friend suggests that Gael is still young and good looking enough to qualify as a “mail order bride”. On the other side of the galaxy, Bram is a miner turned farmer eking out a living on a barely habitable planet. It’s a lonely life, and when he spots Gael on a companion site, he decides to contract the younger man.

I doubt the idea of mail order brides in the future is a new one. There are too many science fiction stories set on rough-and-tumble remote mining colonies for it not to have been thought of before, but this is the first book I can remember reading with that plot. It’s a very interesting setup and on the whole it drives the plot very well. There is however one major nit to pick with the plot. Early on, there’s a big plot twist, which the blurb describes as a “complication”, so I won’t spoil it with details, but the twist stretches credulity a little too far. It sets up a situation that drives the rest of the story, but it just didn’t seem believable. Credulity is a funny thing. I can believe humans can invent a technology to fold space and travel across the galaxy, but I have a hard time believing a character can do something that everything we’ve learned about them says they’re not capable of.

Once you get past the somewhat unbelievable plot twist, the characters themselves are quite believable. Both Gael and Bram are relatable people, whose actions and reactions seem quite natural. Even their mutual attraction — something which you usually just have to take as a given — makes sense given what we learn about their characters. Around the two protagonists are a small number of secondary characters who each play a significant role in the story. There are almost no throw-away or cardboard cutout people in this story.

The science aspect of this sci-fi tale is surprisingly strong. While this is definitely a character driven story, there’s enough hard science to enhance the plot without boring the reader.

“To See the Sun” is available from Amazon (commissionable link).