Novella Review: The Planets All Shone by Nora Fleischer

Media Type: Ebook (Novella)
Title: The Planets All Shone
Author: Nora Fleischer
Publisher: Jennifer Lee Goloboy
Pages: Kindle; 44
Release Date: May 25, 2016
Source: Author
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Genre: Science Fiction, Humor

HDB Rating: 3 Keys to My Heart

Recommended to: Readers looking for a quick jaunt into a funny and lighthearted Science Fiction read.

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Dana Elson never should have drunk that soda. Now she’s sharing her body with the clone of a dead man– and she and the clone’s gun-happy boyfriend are on the run from the sinister Mahler Corporation. Can Dana to get her own body back before Mahler catches up to them? The Planets All Shone is a buddy comedy for fans of the great American road trip.

I jumped at the chance to review this novella, because The Planets All Shone looked like a perfect mesh between Sci Fi and humor! It’s not easy to mesh those two things, but when it’s done right it can be pretty amazing. Best of all, this was a novella. It’s nice to have a short jaunt into somewhere new, interspersed between longer novels. Nora Fleischer had my attention.

For characters that I didn’t have much time to get to know, Dana, Adam and Jay were actually fairly well fleshed out. They each had their own quirks, their own personalities, and I liked how they bantered with one another. The concept of sharing your body with someone else has been done before, but I liked that Fleischer added in the ability for that body to morph back and forth. I can’t even imagine how odd it would feel to know that you’re changing into someone else. Especially when that someone else isn’t even the same gender as you. Dana was a good sport about it, and she had me giggling more than a few times at the way that she handled her “relationship” with Adam.

Truly, it was the plot that suffered in this novella format. There was only a small portion of time to settle Dana into her new reality, give the entire backstory for Adam and Jay’s abilities, plus make sure that the reader knew why they were on the run. Things flew by at break neck speed, and a lot of times it was really difficult to figure out exactly what was going on. The times that things slowed down enough to really get into, like when Dana introduced Adam to her family, I loved. I would have loved to see The Planets All Shone ravamped into a longer format, so that there was more time to really fall into the story.

As it stands, this is a pretty solid and fun read. It flies by, all told. The only other thing I wanted to mention is that the formatting makes this a little hard to figure out when Jay is “speaking” and when Dana is just thinking to herself. It would have been great for that to be a bit more easy to discern. Other than that, I think this has great promise! If Nora Fleischer can capture my attention with this length of a story, I have no doubt she can do it again with a much longer one.

FTC Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. I was not monetarily compensated for my opinion.