Lucky

by R.H. Webster

Life in the space lanes isn't the easiest, but for Trigg Donner, commander of the space freighter Rosebud, it's more than a steady paycheck—it's home. But when a routine landing on San Pedro unearths a mystery simmering on his own ship, Trigg comes face to face with his own fears and distrust. After spending several years stranded on a distant mining colony, former graduate student Cassandra "Lucky" Luckenbach finally has enough money saved up to catch a spaceship back home to Earth. She boards the Rosebud unaware that she is walking into the middle of a life-altering interstellar conspiracy. Mystery, adventure, and romance await her on the flight home. Before she arrives on Earth, she will be forced to ask herself what it is that she really wants, and who she wants to be.

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 28, 2018

Reviews

[A.C. Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Space" and "western" come together delightfully in this space western - scruffy miners and barmaids and space marines mix together, sudden shoot-outs and problems with the gravity plates on the spaceship. The world-building is great, the characters are diverse and entertaining, and several moments made me gasp out loud. Highly enjoyed!

[Jacqueline Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, well-written space western that fans of "Firefly" will absolutely go nuts over. The world-building is sublime and as someone who typically isn't a sci-fi reader, I was able to keep up with the story and visualize the settings and scenery with ease. As always, however, the colorful cast of characters absolutely makes the story for me.

[Billy Buttons · Rating 4 out of 5]

A WISHING SHELF BOOK REVIEW
29th September 2021
TITLE: Lucky
AUTHOR: R H Webster
Star Rating: 4

‘A thoroughly enjoyable ‘space’ adventure with a strong romantic undercurrent. Very enjoyable!’ The Wishing Shelf

REVIEW
This is a thoroughly enjoyable space romp from the talented pen of R H Webster. Written with plenty of pace and, thankfully, not overly technical, it follows the adventure of Lucky who finds herself stranded on a distant mining colony and finds a way of getting back to Earth: on the spaceship, Rosebud. There she meets Commander Trigg Donner. What follows is a cleverly plotted mystery with plenty of danger and a good dollop of romance .
I happen to be a big fan of Star Trek, so this was sort of right up my street. Although there’s slightly too much romance for my liking, there is good chemistry between Trigg and Lucky, and the mystery is well-handled with plenty of twists to keep readers engaged. The spaceship setting is also interestingly described, but not overly so; so, if you happen not to be overly technical-minded, don’t worry; you’ll follow everything.
In terms of the writing style, the author works hard to offer the reader interesting, often even charismatic, characters, and they develop fully as the story unfolds. There’s also plenty of speech which, for the most part, the author is excellent at. And there always seems to be a good balance between that speech and descriptive prose. As with many novels, it gets a little slow in the middle, but the last chapters are a blast!
All in all, I’m happy to recommend this space opera to anybody who enjoys a mystery amongst the stars. It’s a jolly romp, and the romance, although a little icky in parts, is well-handled; so much so, you’ll be rooting for them by the end.
Enjoy!

A ‘Wishing Shelf’ Book Review
www.thewsa.co.uk

[Aly Welch · Rating 5 out of 5]

While comparisons to Firefly are inevitable, the similarities begin and end at 'space western'. The world of Lucky feels somehow dustier and more grounded in reality. The sci-fi elements are present, and there's some interesting ideas regarding space travel but it doesn't bog down the storytelling. I wouldn't describe the picture of the future Lucky paints as dystopian, but it does reflect the way in which, for all our technological advances, so many core problems remain. We can expand our world to other planets but still can't envision a world without poverty and injustice built into the system.

That doesn't mean there isn't fun to be had. Lucky is filled with action, adventure, and romance. Also, women. Women who talk to each other and get along and don't fall into obvious tropes. So at least some things look brighter in the future.

[Joshua Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great space tale

A wonderful, well written story for those that enjoy a good syfy story with a dash of romance, and murderous betrayal. The story revolves around Lucky as she signs on to work on the freight ship Rosebud, in order to get back home on Earth. Things tale a turn as some of the crew members notice that things onboard aren't as they appear to be. I thoroughly enjoyed this story! With the ways the characters interacted on the Rosebud, it kept making me think of the show Firefly. I highly recommend this one!

[Books Shelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love sci-fi novels, so I started reading Lucky already knowing I'll like it. Of course, I do that with every book I pick up, but unfortunately, I'm rarely right in my pre-assessment. With this book, however, I struck gold. The characters, that setting, the western feel - all of it just grabbed me from the very first chapter! I would love to see this story on the silver screen, would be much more interesting than what's already out there.

Colin
BooksShelf Reviewer

[Jacqui Castle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucky was a fun and engaging read, with enough space adventure and romance to keep the pages turning! I'll be on the lookout for the next title from this new author.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was OK, but not great. The romance was leisurely and clean; the mystery subplot wasn't that mysterious (I spotted the "surprise" criminal well before the characters did); the technology didn't make a whole lot of sense; there seemed to be elements that had either been incompletely cut out or not fully developed; and it needed another edit for typos. (I had a review copy from Netgalley, but the publication date is a couple of years ago, so I assume I have the published version.)

This is one of those space operas where most of the non-spacefaring technology is, if anything, a bit behind the current real-world state of the art, especially the information technology. Much is made of the heroine's ability to organize the ship's files by "alphabetizing" and making them searchable, but every filesystem available today can search files for keywords already. Printed books have been entirely replaced by electronic copies for environmental reasons, but instead of people having one device through which they access everything (such as the ones that already exist in real life), there are a profusion of "flex screens" that, while they appear to be reusable, also get handed round with single documents on them; people carry multiple ones of them. There's also a reference to a "printer" which never seems to get used, and it's not clear what it would be used for, given the other tech that's mentioned. There's no ship's AI even as good as Alexa, and if you want to talk to someone on the ship, you do an announcement over the general PA to the whole ship rather than calling their individual phone (which do exist). It's apparently cheaper to use oppressed humans than automation to do manufacturing. In general, I had the impression that the tech hasn't been thought through, and that the author maybe doesn't know much about current technology.

The interstellar flights are vaguely handwaved, and time to orbit seems very short. An experienced pilot doesn't detect when the ship takes off, orbits, and lands again, which I found difficult to believe.

The colonised planets are fairly dystopian, corrupt and harsh, and society seems to have become more conservative (which could happen; such things come and go, but there's no real sense of a historical reason for it). One of the planets has a "magnetic east," which makes no sense (magnetism flows between north and south; east and west are based on the planet's rotation with respect to its star).

There's an odd distinction made between the captain of the ship and the commander of the ship; these are two different people. It's never clear what the captain does if he's not in command. The size of the crew is never made specific, but there is what appears to be a full-time ship's doctor, which seems over the top for a smallish freighter that carries a few passengers. The doctor is Asian, and is the only person who is not apparently either of white American or Hispanic descent; the overall impression is that all the colonies, or at least all the ones in this part of space, are colonies of the USA, and a USA that is less ethnically diverse than the current one.

At the start of the book, the rationale for bringing the heroine onto the crew is that they are down a person (a cargo handler) and regulations require a full complement. But at the end of the book, they're down two much more senior crew, and that doesn't seem to present a problem for flying to the next planet.

I could ignore all this, which was mostly background, but the plot itself gave a sense that either not everything has been revealed by the end, not all the elements had been fully developed, or big chunks had been cut out and left traces behind. For example, at one point someone references (deprecatingly) the ship commander's religion, but this mention is the only indication that he's religious; we never see any hint of it when we're in his viewpoint. The heroine falls asleep without turning out her bedside light; when she wakes up, it's off, and the person who came to wake her turns it on. The fact that this is mentioned seems like it should be significant, like someone or something turned it off, but nothing ever comes of it, and it ends up seeming like just an odd continuity error. There's some business about a deck plate that keeps coming loose in flight, and other issues with the ship's artificial gravity, but it never ends up getting properly explained. (There is some mention of the gravity being manipulated to hide things being smuggled, but it's not fully worked out or ever completely summarized.)

Then there are a lot of minor typos - the usual thing, small words missing from sentences or substituted for other small words, like "the" for "then" and the like, which are hard to pick up unless you're very vigilant, and some missed quotation marks. There's the occasional missing past perfect tense, too.

If it didn't have all these minor issues, it would still be kind of average and nothing special; entertaining enough, but bland and lacking much development. A solidly three-star book.

[Ƶ§œš¹ · Rating 3 out of 5]

The eponymous character, Cassandra Luckenbach, has been stuck on the planet San Pedro after her anthropological thesis research funding ran out. She's finally able to afford a ticket to United Earth, but is commissioned to work as a secretary for Commander Donner (Trigg). They grow close during the trip. When they stop at Newport, they discover that their pilot, Tom Jackson, has been running drugs for the black market. They stop Jackson and fall in love. This wasn't a bad read, though I could tell that the focus was on the romantic tension between Trigg and Lucky because not much else was happening for most of the story. Looking at other takes on this book, a lot of people have described this as being like Firefly and I don't really see it. The crew doesn't have a close-knit dynamic, there's more characters, and I don't get a sense that these people are trying to skirt the law like with Firefly. I could say that it's like Star Trek with romance, but maybe we can just say that it's space romance. The story worked and I didn't mind that it was a low-stakes narrative that took place in space or that it wasn't a grand space opera adventure. I was a little thrown off that the first POV we get, that of Felina Sanchez, turns out to be someone who is not at all important to the rest of story.

I get the sense that the catapult system, which is how ships travel offworld, was inspired by a roller coaster ride.

[Elena Alvarez Dosil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review originally published at: https://lomeraniel.com/book-review-lu...

Lucky starts as a space opera western. A man from the Rosebud crew is killed on a planet, and his job needs to be fulfilled by one of the passengers. Cassandra Luckenbach, Lucky, offers her assistance and she gets a temporary job among the crew. The spaceship continues its voyage, amidst very strange phenomena like issues with the gravity plates and lost objects.

I found this a pleasant and light reading, but the story turned quite fast into a romance novella set in a spaceship, which is not my cup of tea. I don’t mind romance in a book but when it becomes the main topic, I tend to lose interest. Here the romance came down pretty fast, even before we knew the characters well, and also before they really knew each other. Losing each other in the other’s eyes just after they met is not a realistic way of beginning a durable relationship in my opinion. There’s a mystery subplot that I would have liked the story focused on, but it was so underdeveloped that it was difficult to get invested in it.

We don’t know much about the crew of the Rosebud, and I’m not even sure we’ve met all of them. I think more character development would have helped in the mystery subplot to get the reader more engaged. I found the crew to be a more homogeneous bunch than in similar books of the genre, even more homogeneous than the current population of the United States. There’s little world-building, that could have helped to give depth to this story, and maybe open the door to a sequel. The Rosebud is a transport ship between colonies, but apart from poor conditions and totalitarian regimes in some of them, we know nothing about how humanity has reached this point in history. There’s also a general lack of technology description, apart from a mention about how spaceships take off, and something about the gravity plaks, but nothing about the speeds a ship as the Rosebud can reach.

I can’t say if we have met all crewmembers of the Rosebud, as this was not explicitly mentioned. I was also confused about the figure of the commander and why it was different than the captain, especially as the Rosebud seemed to be a civilian vessel. The commander’s responsibilities are not mentioned at any point, and the captain barely makes an appearance in the book, so I think as a writer I’ve focused more on delineating the characters better and maybe blending two into one like in this case.

I was bothered by how much the commander and Lucky ground their mollars. This was also mentioned using different words, but this exact expression appears so many times in the book that I had the urge of going back and counting them all to check if they were more than ten.

Daisy Fair delivered a pleasant narration but I observed some small issues that we often see in not very experienced narrators. In general, Fair did a good job at giving each character a distinctive voice and style, but in some voices sounded quite similar, which made following dialogs a bit difficult. I’ve also noticed a couple of times that Fair didn’t change her tone to show the difference between a narrative paragraph and words said by a character, using the character’s voice for the narrative part. Something that bothered me a bit, especially at the beginning, is that some of the characters’ interactions with Lucky were described as kind and cordial, but most of the time they sounded dry and even annoyed. The audio production was correct and there were no audible issues with it.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

[Norma · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Format : Audiobook )
"The shining beacon for humanity."
A bar shooting on San Pedro leaves the space freighter, Rosebud, short of a crew member. Rather than try to hire a replacement on that desolate station, Commander Connor opts instead to temporarily employ one of the passengers to act as his secretary until Newport, the next and larger port, is reached. Cassandra, 'Lucky', is grateful for the financial help the job will give her. An university research student, she'd been stuck for months on San Pedro after her grant has terminated. Now she just wants to get back to earth and try to find a job. But over the four weeks of the journey the coffee is vile, some little things go missing, the gravity plate needed realignment and Lucky starts to fall in love.I

Lucky is a fun, lightweight who dunnit? set in space. Mostly centred around the key crew members of the Rosebud, there's a homely feeling of camaraderie which makes for pleasant listening. The romantic frisson tingles gently through it all but in the background rather than full frontal. The mystery? Not very mysterious but still adds intrigue. Narrator Daisy Fair reads with good pace and modulation and her personalized voicing of the protagonists helps add to their character development, which is otherwise fairly slim.

I did enjoy this book very much until the final few chapters when I became less involved : the story seemed a little rushed as if the author wanted it over.. No great piece of literature, western, or even mystery or space opera. However, the overall impression was good, more a sort of space romp. My thanks to the rights holder of Lucky, who, at my request, freely gifted me a complimentary copy via Audiobook Boom. It was fun. And a great cover.

[Ryne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucky is a little more heavy on the romance than I'd expected, but that's not a knock on it. The chemistry between Trigg, Lucky, and the whole crew is fantastic. The world is dirty, gritty, and deadly. There's very much a Jane Austen feel to the story that revolves around Trigg and Lucky navigating their relationship both professionally and romantically. Eventually, a mystery enshrouds the crew, and that manages to throw in some nice twists to their dynamics. I love the blending of the southwest into the great expanse of space. Through dialogue and culture of the colonies especially, you get a real idea of how their world was built without stopping the adventure to info dump the history.

[Lindsey Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an e-copy of Lucky!!

Lucky is a about a world that has space trade colony. Cassandra ’Lucky’ Luckenbach is finally going back to Earth and gets a job on the ship that she is travelling on when things start to go wrong.

I don’t usually like books that take place in space, but this book has a lot of great things going for it. There is betrayal and romance as well as a cast of characters that all have chemistry. I enjoyed R.H. Webster’s writing style and look forward to reading more!!

[Dandy Blagg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't typically read romance novels. I'm more of a Stephen King, Mark Tufo kind of gal but I really enjoyed this book! I really didn't know what was going to happen or who the antagonist(s) was/were until right before the reveal. I am usually able to guess so the surprise was an added bonus and made an even better story! I figured it out a few chapters before it was revealed and I sucked in a breath and said 'That b****' out loud =)
This is a fun read/listen and I look forward to listening to Webster's next book!

[Kim Goodwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Space westerns and science fiction genres are not my typical choices, but Lucky has me questioning that decision. The plot was intricately developed from the very first page, and I couldn’t stop reading because Lucky is also filled with suspense and intrigue. Oh, there’s also the perfect amount of romance thrown in too. Lucky is a delightful first novel, and a truly fun read.

[Jeri Aries · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never have i ever thought i would like a space book until this! I tend to steer clear of them idk i seem to have no interest! But omg i love the characters love the story love everything! Looking forward to starting the sequel!

[shan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome debut novel! It kept me up late because I wanted to finish :)

[Erich Wildgrube · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional sci fi adventure in the vein of Firefly and Trigun!

[Jon Perrotti · Rating 5 out of 5]

This upbeat space adventure-romance offers the reader a fun escape with plenty of wit, quirkiness, and warmth. It takes place in the region of space close to Earth where planet-colonies are included in busy routes for trade and travel. While many novels set in space will feature sleek and fabulous spaceships with pretentious explanations of futuristic technology, the merchant spaceship Rosebud is a kind of ramshackle clunker occupied by fun and interesting crew and passengers. The endearing Luckenbach is asked to help out on the Rosebud as a temporary crew member but soon becomes an indispensable member of the motley team. The ship’s commander, affectionately known as Trigg, has had bad luck with love in the past, but he is attracted to Lucky both physically and intellectually. The space colony of Newport, a kind of Wild West with corruption and outlaws, becomes the setting for the unraveling of a murderous smuggling operation. Thrown together to solve the mystery and confront the culprits, Lucky and Trigg find each other along with the way. The author reflects the influences of her west Texas home with Latinx characters and occasional Spanish phrases along with such unique details as a reference to the aroma of fresh tortillas in the markets of Newport. This anime-flavored tale is populated by colorful characters such as Giovanna Marino, who prays the rosary and beats everyone at chess, the tell-it-like-it-is canteen cook Miss Johnnie “from the southern part of the North American region called Georgia,” and the gullible Stubbs with his pet rocks. Lucky represents a fresh new avenue for sci-fi. No dark dystopia here—instead, look for flirting and grins and shots of Jack Daniel whiskey.

[Anjana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had this book for a while before I got around to it. Even after I started it, I misjudged the direction in which it was heading. By the time I finished the book, I had liked it. Not unlike the characters in the novel, I seemed to have gone on a ride of highs and lows in finishing this.
This is based in a dystopia of a world where humans have colonised the milky way and beyond. Travel between different planets is common but expensive. Paid work is slightly different from what we know in the real world. The world-building was simple and built upon itself as the story progressed. The thing I liked in the entire story was the characters - at least the good guys. They seemed realistic and interesting, I will not, however, comment on the bad guys because they were not convincing enough. That is probably why I liked the story in its entirety but was not blown away by it. It starts off like it might drift into a love story but after the first few chapters focuses more on their journey and the smaller issues (and later the bigger ones) plaguing them. It is essentially an adventure story set in space, in the future with some romance sprinkled in.
The writing was straightforward, easy and quick to read. Once I got going, I finished the book in one sitting.

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction W383L 2018