Sanctuary

by J. Jones

In the 31st century, on the far-flung Outer Colony world of Sanctuary, Karina Med-Milan - a young woman from a race of feline aliens - leaves home on her own for the first time. She joins Adrian Blackwood, courier and pilot of Starchaser, and travels far and wide across her remarkable homeworld.

Meanwhile, on the other side of inhabited space entirely, a dire conspiracy - a cover-up of a threat that could exterminate all life across the galaxy - has reared its head. Darius, a malfunctioning AI, slowly unravels the truth of what happened to the city he was created to watch over, and why - after two decades of silence - the planet has suddenly drawn soldiers, scientists, and secret agents once again.

Sanctuary is the debut novel of John Patrick Jones, and tells a tale of friendship, adventure, and sorrow across a backdrop of the far future. It features a cast diverse in race, species, gender, sexuality, and ability, including openly gay, transgender, nonbinary, and disabled characters.

240 pages, Paperback

Published March 20, 2018

Reviews

[Aspen Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The opening is a little heavy-handed with sci-fi exposition, and at times the writing feels a little bit like a cishet person trying to write queer characters, but I know nothing about the author so that could be nothing more than something like a generational divide in language. Regardless of those two criticisms, the characters were consistently interesting enough to have me enjoying their interactions, and once the plot picks up and explains a bit of the vague beginning stuff, it gets a lot more engaging. The plot twist, for instance, is one of the best I've seen, and I won't spoil anything, but I constantly bring up this book when I'm talking about examples of stories where a character's transness is integral to the plot without it being pandering or disrespectful. A good read overall, obviously imperfect, but what book isn't?

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a bit skeptical of this at first (I don't even remember where I got it from) but it would up being a nice read. The beginning is overwrought, but the writing gets much better pretty quickly. The book's biggest strengths are its characters, who are all delightful. This is a smidge ironic because as far as the overall plot goes, the characters are one of the weaker points, because several of them have no narrative purpose; you could remove them entirely and the plot wouldn't change. The writing would be more tight if they were cut or if the plot were tweaked to give them something to do.

That being said, it was still a lot of fun, and it's so nice to see this kind of gender diversity and acceptance in print media.

[Maria]

DNF. While I appreciate the inclusivity.. the language strut made it very difficult to read.