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Star Language
Melina is super unlucky when it comes to mothers; hers is an abusive greedy drugged-up nightmare who sells her to traffickers. She’s a lot luckier when it comes to boyfriends – her big strong alien bae makes everyone thirst. The one department where her luck is absolutely on point has to do with her talent – a flair for learning languages that makes her the only one capable of performing translation duty once the aliens reach Earth. Trigger warning: SA, ultraviolence, 18+, explicit badness.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 1, 2024
I am one of the judges of team Space Girls for the SPSFC3 contest. This review is my personal opinion. Officially, it is still in the running for the contest, pending any official team announcements.
Status: Pending
Read: 100%
To be honest, I did not have very high expectations of this book. The entire book is formatted as a diary entry where our protagonist Melina recounts her difficult childhood and later experience as a sex slave, and finally a translator for an invading alien species. The book has a very grim story, to say the least.
It is a funny thing, but what gave me reserves early on ceased bothering me because the story is so damn enthralling. I became quite vested in Melina's success despite the odds. Perhaps it is because I am a multilingual speaker, so I felt quite identified with Melina. Just like her, I had teachers dismiss my initially stumbling Spanish. Teachers nowadays are much more attuned to the benefits of billingualism in children, but the book is written with so much vagueness that it could have very well taken place in the year 2000. The book has a few phrases in Spanish that are all corrrect (they are only missing their correct diacritics).
I quite enjoyed how the author cleverly toys with the mixture of culture in the alien language. They have dozens of words for troop positions and star ships (kind of like Klingon), but lack all kinds of phrases for things like saying thank you or please. We also get to learn a few other things about the alien culture such as their kind of weird lab grown capybara stew (head and tail included) and that some of the aliens caught Moctezuma's revenge.
As for Melina, she is very well written, with a realistic manner of hiding her true emotions to appease her volatile mother Karen. I believe her mother has Borderline Personality Disorder, which explains the anger outbursts, dangerous behavior (such as her covert drug addiction) and antagonizing her daughter in every way. Plenty of books could have made the mother cartoonish and Melina detestable, but I felt a huge heap of sympathy for Melina and disdain for the mother. If this is what the author was going for in the reader, it worked with me.
Melina forms a prison friendship of sorts with a fellow brothel slave named Stella. It felt quite realistic they would not be quite like friends (their pimps would beat them up if they displayed overt closeness), but they aren't rivals either. While Melina has displayed a huge desire to learn the alien language, Stella is quite the opposite and prefers to teach the aliens English and Spanish. Their friendship stays amicable for the rest of the novel, but they never become truly close.
As for the aliens, they are quite an interesting lot. Banscu seems decent enough, even more because he is a blue collar grunt. I would have wanted to see female aliens, that might be the one thing missing for me. The story later o focuses on the alien commandar Moravin who is business oriented, has some good qualities, but ultimately is the worst asshole of the bunch.
In a nutshell, I didn't feel intimidated by the grim subject matter of this novel. It was handled quite well and the mental illness representation is also going in this book's favor. The telling format feels awkward at first, but it does feel quite reminiscent of Spanish language fiction and it helps move the grim scenes in fast forward to the main story conflict.
At only 180 pages long, this book is a fast read and I pretty much expected the ending it had. It was handelled well, and interestingly, loosely inspired by the conquest of Tenochtitlan by the Spanish. I am quite impressed the author did such a realistic job portraying multilingual character despite being a monolingual English speaker.
A part of me wanted to give this book 4.5 stars because I did quite enjoy it a lot, but there is a line of the book at the final page featuring author being very supportive of generated AI images. This felt morally wrong for me because the technology was based on theft of copyrighted works and generated images are insanely polluting to the environment by consuming huge quantities of potable water. So, I have oprted to give the book a solid 4 stars.
Status: Pending
Read: 100%
To be honest, I did not have very high expectations of this book. The entire book is formatted as a diary entry where our protagonist Melina recounts her difficult childhood and later experience as a sex slave, and finally a translator for an invading alien species. The book has a very grim story, to say the least.
It is a funny thing, but what gave me reserves early on ceased bothering me because the story is so damn enthralling. I became quite vested in Melina's success despite the odds. Perhaps it is because I am a multilingual speaker, so I felt quite identified with Melina. Just like her, I had teachers dismiss my initially stumbling Spanish. Teachers nowadays are much more attuned to the benefits of billingualism in children, but the book is written with so much vagueness that it could have very well taken place in the year 2000. The book has a few phrases in Spanish that are all corrrect (they are only missing their correct diacritics).
I quite enjoyed how the author cleverly toys with the mixture of culture in the alien language. They have dozens of words for troop positions and star ships (kind of like Klingon), but lack all kinds of phrases for things like saying thank you or please. We also get to learn a few other things about the alien culture such as their kind of weird lab grown capybara stew (head and tail included) and that some of the aliens caught Moctezuma's revenge.
As for Melina, she is very well written, with a realistic manner of hiding her true emotions to appease her volatile mother Karen. I believe her mother has Borderline Personality Disorder, which explains the anger outbursts, dangerous behavior (such as her covert drug addiction) and antagonizing her daughter in every way. Plenty of books could have made the mother cartoonish and Melina detestable, but I felt a huge heap of sympathy for Melina and disdain for the mother. If this is what the author was going for in the reader, it worked with me.
Melina forms a prison friendship of sorts with a fellow brothel slave named Stella. It felt quite realistic they would not be quite like friends (their pimps would beat them up if they displayed overt closeness), but they aren't rivals either. While Melina has displayed a huge desire to learn the alien language, Stella is quite the opposite and prefers to teach the aliens English and Spanish. Their friendship stays amicable for the rest of the novel, but they never become truly close.
As for the aliens, they are quite an interesting lot. Banscu seems decent enough, even more because he is a blue collar grunt. I would have wanted to see female aliens, that might be the one thing missing for me. The story later o focuses on the alien commandar Moravin who is business oriented, has some good qualities, but ultimately is the worst asshole of the bunch.
In a nutshell, I didn't feel intimidated by the grim subject matter of this novel. It was handled quite well and the mental illness representation is also going in this book's favor. The telling format feels awkward at first, but it does feel quite reminiscent of Spanish language fiction and it helps move the grim scenes in fast forward to the main story conflict.
At only 180 pages long, this book is a fast read and I pretty much expected the ending it had. It was handelled well, and interestingly, loosely inspired by the conquest of Tenochtitlan by the Spanish. I am quite impressed the author did such a realistic job portraying multilingual character despite being a monolingual English speaker.
A part of me wanted to give this book 4.5 stars because I did quite enjoy it a lot, but there is a line of the book at the final page featuring author being very supportive of generated AI images. This felt morally wrong for me because the technology was based on theft of copyrighted works and generated images are insanely polluting to the environment by consuming huge quantities of potable water. So, I have oprted to give the book a solid 4 stars.
May 29, 2025
This is an interesting tale but it’s grim, very grim. I finished it feeling really quite depressed.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews