Review: Yours to Uncover by Mel Teshco

Is she willing to sacrifice everything to keep her secret and her lover safe?

It's the year 2202. Earth is grossly overpopulated and seriously polluted. Rita Songworth has spent half her twenty-two years trying to escape the dying planet. It's taken the last five of those years to realize making it in the hard-ass infantry is her only way out, via space transporter Earth Ship Siren.

But the journey to Unity, the new colony, isn't easy. Rita has to resist an attraction to hard, brutish prisoner, Tristan MacFallan, whose masterful hands create more than the beautiful art he's been assigned to make. His forbidden touch affects her profoundly and he sees things in her no man ever has before. But obeying Kane, her ex-lover and malicious lieutenant, who is appointed to keeping the prisoners under guard, comes at a high price. Is she willing to sacrifice everything to keep her secret and her lover safe?

I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

Yours to Uncover is the first of three novellas in the ES Siren series, each written by a different author.

In the case of Yours to Uncover, I’ve come up against a personal trope-fobia. For me, any story where some rich and powerful man makes things very hard for our heroine and her underdog hero is one I’ll avoid. For example, Titanic. The injustices thrust upon our hero and heroine are so stressful I’ll move on to something else. Granted, everyone saw the movie, loved the move, and it made a lot of money but that particular storyline is one I avoid as much as possible.

In this case, however, I requested a copy for review so I stuck with it. If I hadn’t requested a copy for review it would have slipped quietly off my kindle. So why did I request it? The covers are gorgeous and I'm a big fan of sic-fi romance.

I found moving through something in my “avoid” list was not only good for me (yes, we're not always going to review books we'd pick out for ourselves), but in the process I found an author I’ll read more of and a great series to continue.

I like the way this series portrays our heroes as disadvantaged (they are prisoners, chosen for their strong backs or because they have skills useful in building a successful colony) and the heroines are women of rank among the solders in charge of their journey. In Yours to Uncover, this doesn't prevent the heroes from being strong characters.

Zane (as he's called in the story) or Kane (as he's called in the blurb) is sick, despicable and mean. Everything I'd expect from the mess of a Lieutenant cast to spoil the relationship between Rita and Tristan.

Overall, I enjoyed Teshco's writing and found the world building and character development to be as much as can be done considering a novella. I know this type of against the odds love story is popular and if it's your thing, then here it is.

Enjoy!