Alex is a young adult who moved to Scorpio, an earth-like planet colonized by people from Earth, with her parents when she a kid. Three months after their arrival on Scorpio, a giant alien race invaded and destroyed everything on the surface of the planet, killing all but about 150 people who were close enough to an underground administrative base that they were able to hide and save themselves. But the giants, referred to as Lankies, don't leave Scorpio, instead stay and degrade the terraforming until the planet is nothing but stone, dust, gray skies and rainstorms. Even the air is toxic. Only soldiers and a few select civilians are allowed to ever leave their underground safe house, which they do to make salvage runs for food, battery packs, and any other supplies they can find in the other demolished cities on the planet.

A key to their safety and success in avoiding Lankies is their trained dogs, who can sense them long before their human companions can see them or feel the tremors of their steps on the ground. As a dog trainer, Alex goes out on salvage runs, traveling with the soldiers. She and her dog Ash monitor the areas while the civilians search and recover supplies and the soldiers stay on alert in case of attack by a Lankey.

This book is good for someone interested in getting into SciFi as a genre. I'd consider it "soft SciFi" because the reader isn't overwhelmed (I wasn't anyway) by technical jargon and long scientific descriptions of how everything works or the names of all the technology used. The story has more the feel of people living a bit in the future, but the tech isn't hard to conceptualize. For example, the vehicle the salvage team travels in isn't described more than needed for the reader to understand what's happening and imagine how it looks. I didn't imagine lots of buttons and lights and robotics, I saw a bigger, tougher tank specialized to the terrain they traveled over.

This story contained plenty of suspense while Alex and Ash work with the soldiers during the team's most difficult salvage run to date. I loved seeing Alex care for Ash while they were out on the land and facing down Lankies. I became emotionally invested in Alex and Ash almost instantly, and I was still thinking about Ash at the end of the book. (Sorry if this is a spoiler, but I'll assure all potential readers that no dogs die in this book.)

I didn't like that Alex didn't pine for Ash more when they were separated. But I guess when you've experienced the hardships she did, you learn to keep moving forward.

The book description on Amazon began with the following line, which threw me for a loop. I imagine Scorpio's book description is the same wherever you buy it, so I don't think my sharing it here is a spoiler. This is the line: "On a distant Earth colony, an orphaned survivor of an alien invasion discovers that the greatest world-ending dangers aren’t behind her." I made the mistake of going on to read the rest of the description, which gave me the misguided idea about something bad that would happen and that it would happen from an unexpected source. Given this, I was distracted throughout the book, wondering where this plot twist would rear its ugly head. Well, it didn't. In case anyone else has the same idea I did after reading the description, there isn't a plot twist. That's not to say this isn't a good book. But don't let your expectations distract you from enjoying the story.

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Created Feb 09, 2024 at 2:03pm • Submit your own review...