In the Company of Others

My favorite aspect of this book is the originality of the First Contact and the alien.

This was a fantastic read of the sort where putting down the book took a serious amount of willpower.

I'm not sure what to say, but this was a very intelligent Science Fiction story, cleverly written to raise important questions, with an overarching mystery...and it was a serious page turner with a romance that pulled at my heartstrings.

I shot through the last quarter and now I need to remember how to breath.

Wow!

I started out really liking this book. Great world building. Pretty interesting aliens. I liked the writing style. Then, about halfway through, it turned into a romance, and not the romance I actually wanted. By the end, this was the main plotline, and it really just fizzled out for me. I think romance in sci-fi is very tricky, and it's great when it works well, but this one just felt kind of childish and basic (especially when Grant and Malley are both way more interesting characters).

Picked this up to read for a book club. The story and characterization feels so dated I was quite surprised to discover it was published in 2001 - I was expecting something closer to 1950... The Audible narrator does it no favors either, and I found I had to bump the speed up to 2x to keep from falling asleep