October 2020 READER: Chilling Effect by Valdes

[Teresa, Plan B is in Effect]

The October 2020 Reader Pick is Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes. Please use this thread to post questions, comments, and reviews, at any time.

Official description:
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.

[Trike]

October 2920? Wow, I *really* got on jump on this pick!

😁

[Teresa, Plan B is in Effect]

Oooops..... fixed

[Icy-Cobwebs-In-Space]

Anticipating this, both for Space Opera, Divergence, Female SF author; but also because "The ship’s hold is full of psychic cats" reminds me of the wonderful story All Cats Are Gray. Can't wait to dive in.

This is delightful! A great choice! What a heroine! The settings are delectable, and Eva's ability to fall into the worst situations possible....)

[Leticia]

Does All cats are gray, has cats on a ship too?

I think that the cats could have appeared even more, but the book was quite entertaining even though.

[Icy-Cobwebs-In-Space]

i've got to reread All Cats Are Gray, I will today, but I remember it as edgy, feminist, unexpected.

Guess I could apply those to Chilling Effect too! Eager to read Prime Deceptions.

[Nic]

I enjoyed Chilling Effect enough that I immediately went out and bought the sequel.
There are a couple of things that I found difficult with the book, which is why it ended up as a three star for me. There's stuff with Vakar that didn't quite land for me, and the dropping into Cuban slang left me hanging a lot - I kept going out to look for translations and found some but not others. In the end I decided to just handle that by considering it an exclamation around something or get a rough idea of what's said via other contexts.

[Trike]

Nic wrote: "Ithe dropping into Cuban slang left me hanging a lot"

Same. I treated the sudden explosions of Spanish the way I did the insertions of Chinese in Firefly: it was the intent rather than the exact translation. Didn’t really bother me much.

[Nic]

Trike wrote: "Nic wrote: "Ithe dropping into Cuban slang left me hanging a lot"

Same. I treated the sudden explosions of Spanish the way I did the insertions of Chinese in Firefly: it was the intent rather than..."
Once I got my head around doing that it made the reading a great deal easier and has allowed me to enjoy the sequel more.

[Caitlin]

I haven’t finished this yet since it took a awhile for my hold to come in at the library. I’m quite enjoying it! I can definitely see the Mass Effect and Firefly DNA in this, but it’s doing enough that’s original not to feel too derivative.

I’ve been having fun using my phone’s translate feature on some of the Spanish phrases I was curious about, though I also agree with Nic that they work fine untranslated just to add color to the dialogue.

[Leticia]

I think I was fine with the Spanish words because my mother language is Portuguese, so I understood all her curses Lol. But they are mostly to make the story more funny in a colorful way and it completely worked for me. An idea for the book would be a glossary of the Spanish expressions so that English speakers could get them better. In any case, an idea would be to google translate them because they do add to make the book funnier.