Ascension features a protagonist (named Alana) who is a black woman who is also a lesbian, and who struggles with chronic pain. She also a spaceship engineer who dreams of sailing the stars. I truly could not ask for more from life than a heroine with these specific characteristics. By page 18, I was in love. The rest of the book was something of a disappointment, but boy did I adore Alana.

The story involves Alana and her struggles to become accepted as an engineer on a spaceship (she works in a port and wants to get into space). She battles class oppression and Mel’s Disease, a degenerative affliction that causes pain, muscle rigidity, and tremors, which she controls with medication that is hard to obtain and pay for. Her sister, Nova, works for the upper classes as a spiritual guide. Both sisters see each other as foolish and self-destructive but in different ways. When Alana stows away on a spaceship, she falls in love with the ship’s captain (a woman named Tev), helps kidnap her sister for plot reasons, and becomes involved in a complicated mess of a plot that involves entire planets being blown up because the villainess has familial issues.

I love that this romance features women, not just in a romantic way, but also as crewmates and family members. There’s only one man on the ship and he’s part wolf, so that’s a thing. I actually got all the way through the book before I realized that in the entire book there are only two male characters, and one barely shows up. I appreciated that this felt so natural – as common as if I read a book entirely populated by guys but with one token chick. I especially enjoyed the portrayal of a contentious yet ultimately loving relationship between sisters. Incidentally, the book is also unusual in that it is accepting of a poly relationship and presents that as a viable Happy Ever After option.

I also loved the treatment of chronic pain and disability, with one caveat. Alana is not the only character who struggles with a physical disability. The captain, Tev, has a prosthetic leg. Meanwhile, much of the plot involves the crew trying to save the pilot, Marre, because she is literally fading away due to a kind of metaphysical illness. My caveat is that even though Alana’s condition is fictional, her symptoms are portrayed very realistically and grittily. As a person who struggles with chronic pain, I found it thrilling to see it so realistically represented in science fiction and romance, but also hard to read about. It’s not a book that helped me escape.

Unfortunately, neither the plot nor the characters, other than Alana and her sister, Nova, gelled for me. This was especially a problem when it came to the romance between Tev and Alana. I liked the idea of Tev, the polyamorous lesbian ship captain with a prothetic leg, but she never became more than a cool idea. As much as I like the idea of this character, I need her to act like a person who happens to have all those characteristics, not a paper doll that says “Alana’s Fantasy Woman.”

All the characters suffered from being extremely perfunctory. They each had certain characteristics that were briefly described, and which sounded fascinating, but were never fleshed out. We never leave Alana’s perspective, and she’s very much an outsider, so that’s part of it. Also, this is the first book in a new series. But since Nova manages to seem like an actual, complex character despite the fact that Alana doesn’t understand her at all, you’d think that the other characters could have had more life as well.

The romance with Tev is very perfunctory. It becomes interesting when the issue of an open relationship is raised, but I never fully understood why Alana and Tev fell in love. Much like the problems with incomplete character development, their romance seemed less like the natural development for these people and more like a great idea that the author had.

As for the plot…I dunno, you guys. I’m bad at plot. I do not understand what happened and I can’t tell you about what happened without ruining the book. Not one single thing about the plot seemed plausible, even the simpler aspects that I actually understood. No, you can’t get a job as an engineer on a starship by stowing away on a starship that already has one. THEY HAVE ONE. How would they feed you? Why would they feed you? What is your auntie and business partner supposed to do now that you ditched her with only a cryptic note? Why is there a werewolf on the ship? Why does everyone reveal everything to the bad guy? Why is Tev flipping out about something that Nova clearly did to save her life and clearly doesn’t plan to do again at any other time? Why are all these people acting like lunatics? Then we get to the big reveal of the plot and everything goes completely haywire, not in an “Oh! Cool! I didn’t see that coming way!” but in the fatally different “Oh. Huh. That came out of nowhere” way.

Basically, this book has every possible idea that can appeal to me (including a Firefly vibe with the crew of misfits who tiptoe on the edge of the law), but it falls flat in the execution. I still have my eye on the next book, because I feel like if all these pieces were ever to come together in artistic harmony I’d be the happiest woman on earth. But at the moment, this book has great representation in a lot of ways – of women, of people with disabilities, of people who are lesbian or bisexual, of open relationships, of people of color – but it doesn’t pull them together into something that feels like an organic story with organic characters. I want to give this an A for effort, a diverse cast, and a great cover, but I have to give it a C+ for the final product.