The interplanetary Bechdel Test

With apologies to the actual Bechdel Test, which is about gender in TV, film, and other fictional media.

I am reading Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells, which got 4.3 out of 5 stars on Amazon with 1,115 raters. Honestly, I am not sure how it got that rating. The story was pretty good up to the point where the intrepid ship of Earth astronauts docks with the mysterious alien craft parked out in the asteroid belt and our heroine, a linguistics expert, starts up a telepathic correspondence with t...