Chilling Effect

A Novel

By: Valerie Valdes

Narrated by: Almarie Guerra

Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

A hilarious, offbeat debut space opera that skewers everything from pop culture to video games and features an irresistible foul-mouthed captain and her motley crew, strange life forms, exciting twists, and a galaxy full of fun and adventure.

Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra cruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for even smaller profits. When her sister Mari is kidnapped by The Fridge, a shadowy syndicate that holds people hostage in cryostasis, Eva must undergo a series of unpleasant, dangerous missions to pay the ransom.

But Eva may lose her mind before she can raise the money. The ship’s hold is full of psychic cats, an amorous fish-faced emperor wants her dead after she rejects his advances, and her sweet engineer is giving her a pesky case of feelings. The worse things get, the more she lies, raising suspicions and testing her loyalty to her found family.

To free her sister, Eva will risk everything: her crew, her ship, and the life she’s built on the ashes of her past misdeeds. But when the dominoes start to fall and she finds the real threat is greater than she imagined, she must decide whether to play it cool or burn it all down.

©2019 Valerie Valdes (P)2019 HarperAudio

I think I'm being generous 🤔

Wish I could say I loved it , and really wanted to .... but .... a little too much cursing in English and in Spanish 😕 and not pleased with the sexual exploits " kinda freaky " NOT AT ALL WHAT I'D EXPECTED FROM THE COVER AND THE SAMPLE ! The narration was done well and going to give it more of a chance because of it .. I'm half way through ... but really don't think my rating will change ..

decent story just know draw

it's a fun story, interesting take but it was hard for me to get through. not enough character build up to actually get me engaged but like I said decent story.

Slow start that picks up

I originally started this book because I was excited to see a latinx presence in sci-fi. I was not disapointed with the representation in the book, and there is not so much spanish used that you can't figure out by tone and context what is being said. The story does meander a bit at the start, but it does eventually take off and is very engaging once it does. I wanted to know what happened to the captain, her family, the crew, the cats, etc. It's worth the read if you're okay with a slower start to the real story.

Favorite

Biased, the author is a friend. That said, I loved the story and the narration. I've listened to this audiobook up there with Prisoner of Azkaban. excited for second book coming out next month. : )

Pretty Solid listen

Overall this book is pretty good. You can find a bunch of parallels to other Sci-Fi influences in the story so it's pretty easy to relate to the world and the characters. My biggest issue is you could tell some story beats are coming and how they would play out and the end seemed to drag for me a bit. Not a game changer but its there. As for the other reviewer that was pointing out "Some foreign language", Clearly this character is speaking Spanish. I've never spoken it in my life but I was able to gather what was going on and what the gist was. I chock that up to the Awesome Narration.

Couldn’t finish

The characters should’ve been interesting, but they just fell flat and didn’t develop. Talked to a friend who read the whole thing, and she said it didn’t get better. I gave up.

Hilarious!

I saw previous reviews questioning the humor - I found it hilarious! What people find funny is often subjective so I suggest listening to the sample and purchasing it if you find it amusing. Solid story and great character building - I like the characters and am invested in their fates. I read mass amounts of Sci-Fi and it was great to hear a different voice in this genre. Narrator is perfect! I continued the series and am eagerly waiting for the next installment.

Action-packed! Firefly meets Mass Effect!

Captain Eva Inocente has her own spaceship and a crew that she considers family. Unfortunately, what she doesn't have is a steady income. Then, on her current job - delivering 20 psychic cats - the buyer has gone bankrupt, leaving her with 20 psychic cats and no payment. To make matters worse, she gets a call from an agent of The Fridge - a notorious mobster - that her sister Mari has been taken hostage, and the only way to get her back is to do whatever job The Fridge wants until they decide her debt is paid off. If she refuses, her sister will go into cryostasis for who knows how long. Knowing she has no choice, Eva agrees; the only catch is that she cannot tell anyone about The Fridge or the reason she's taking on these jobs.

But the jobs are dangerous. And they become even more dangerous when she refuses the advances of a somewhat too amorous emperor who will not take no for an answer, and who continually chases Eva and her crew around the universe, threatening the lives of everyone on whatever planet or space station she happens to be at that moment if they will not turn her over to him. He definitely missed the lesson on consent.

The best way to describe this story - which I did not come up with but saw in another review, though I don't remember which one or who wrote it - is that it is Firefly meets Mass Effect.

Among the various members of Eva's crew, my favorite is the ship's engineer Vakar, who belongs to an alien race which communicates via scents; prior to the start of the book, Eva purchased scent translators so she knows what the different scents mean, and that adds an interesting dimension to their conversations, especially when there are scents that the translator hasn't learned yet.

Among the others characters, there is some character development but not a lot. There is so much action going on that there isn't much time left for getting to know the characters. As such, we get to know Eva and Vakar a lot more than the others, simply because they spend more time "on screen" that the other characters. I'm hoping that the sequel includes more character development, as I want to get to know the other characters.

One of the nice things about this book is that I did not see that plot twist coming. I also reacted very similarly to Eva, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that continues to unfold in the next book. For this book, I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Almarie Guerra. I thought she did a great job with the narration and, given the opportunity, I will listen to book 2 too.

Just didn't resonate with me..

This had a very Firefly kind of feel to it. And I loved firefly! But I didn't love this one for some reason. In this one they use Spanish instead of Chinese to cuss and for a lot of the proper names of people and ships. Which is fine except for the fact I don't speak Spanish. Now I don't speak Chinese either however, when watching a show versus listing to the audiobook I can see facial expressions for context clues and it was really only used sparingly. This book uses it much more frequently. If I were reading it I could stop and look up what each phrase meant so I could get the full picture but you can't do that when you're doing an audiobook and I know because I tried. The reader has a thick Spanish accent and me trying to copy that accent into Google Translate was cumbersome to say the least. This was one thing I wasn't a big fan of because I kept wondering WTF this or that meant or what they were talking about altogether. If you speak Spanish or have time to look up each reference then this might be a better book for you. One thing they did on another book, which I suggest if they do a part two of this, was they overlapped the foreign version with an English translation so that you got to hear both at the same time essentially except the English version was more prominent. I think I would have liked that better. The reader was fine...not great, not terrible. The story I think could have used a little more fleshing out of the universe and descriptors of people, places, and things to give you a better view of what we were supposed to see in our minds eye. I dont think I'll go back for part 2 if there is one.

Love it!

Super fun space opera with excellent characters and crazy plot twists. This would be a good movie. The reader rocks this gig!