susanvoss18

Dare (short for Darius) is a 19 year old high school drop out working as a janitor when he is first approached by the Keepers, who are there to keep time running smoothly. First contact doesn’t go so well, and even second and third contact don’t go so well. But eventually, Dare is swept up into a space ship with time traveling capability. M’sang, a rather enormous hamster alien, takes on training Dare, along with the ship’s artificial intelligence, Kim. After some hard knocks in the training ring, Dare is sent on his first mission with some cool gadgetry. And then he runs up against Hope, who is working for another team of time travelers, and she doesn’t hold back.

As the adventure continues, we end up on a future moon that has a small but tenacious population in a sprawling base. For a while, Dare isn’t sure who to trust – Have M’sang and Kim been using him, misleading him? Is Hope right in her efforts to preserve a thread of time she considers to be the right one? To add to his confusion, Lauri, a bio-engineered young lady, enters the mix, along with her substitute father figure, Dr. Lansing. The moon base takes on a deadly personality when a genetic experiment (Hans, a rather large and very intelligent, nearly indestructible spider) is let out to play. Plus there’s all those hamster aliens wanting to invade the base. Yep, Dare has plenty of knots to untangle.

I had a lot of fun with this book. Dare often tosses out quips and references to 80s and90s movies, making little cultural touchstones for the readers. He’s a likeable kid, even if he does come off as too much of a good guy at times. But this feeds into his naivete as he always falls for the damsel in distress. The book pings back and forth from humor to action to mystery to occasional violence. It’s a good balance insuring the reader is never bored or feels the need to hurry through a section to get back to the good parts.

The time travel element is well done, being mostly used as a mechanism to tell the story and not getting hung up on the physics behind such a possibility. The characters were easy to connect with. The bad guys had enough variation that some I wanted dead in horrid ways while others I sympathized with a bit. I especially liked M’sang, his gruffness, his ability to toss Dare around the martial arts room. The mental image of Dare being thrown down by a large, irate hamster gave me the giggles more than once.

There’s only a few females in this novel (Kim, Hope, Lauri, any others?) and two of the three are very attractive. In fact, was one a sex worker early in her career. My one criticism is that I would have liked to see a greater variation in the female characters, as we do with the male characters. Over all, a very entertaining read and I definitely look forward to reading more works by this author.

What I Liked: The big hamster has got some serious moves; Dare was a fun POV for the story; maniacal Hans!; good balance of action, humor, and serious moments; the cover is stunning.

What I Disliked: There are few female characters and they are first introduced as hot, sexy things and later get to be a little more.