This book was a pleasant surprise! I mean, space gays in a western story could never have failed me, but I really enjoyed it outside of that. Fun characters, cool plot, good writing!

Frontier was not actually on my radar for 2023 releases, and I only heard about it because I was invited to participate in an Instagram tour with Pride Book tours. I am so incredibly grateful that I was invited, because otherwise I would’ve missed out on one of my new all-time favorite books! Frontier blew me away and I am absolutely dying to see what Grace Curtis will write next!

Frontier is a fascinating instance of a character remaining nameless for the majority of the narrative. Rather than giving the protagonist a singular name, Curtis referred to her instead by a myriad of names, each reflecting the way she was viewed by the people surrounding her. This allowed me as a reader to build a unique sense of the protagonist’s identity, as I understood her through everyone’s eyes but her own. Additionally, this allows readers to meet a barrage of fascinating side characters, each with their own journeys and motives. This writing technique is not one I have seen before, but was very impactful on me as a reader, and contributed to my overall obsession with this book.

My favorite part of Frontier has to come down to either the world-building or the protagonist’s dedication to her lover. Both are written so compellingly that it is impossible for me to choose a single favorite element! I will be thinking about Frontier for years to come, and it will always hold a special place on my bookshelf.

My Recommendation-
If you love books full of sapphic longing and characters willing to do whatever it takes to protect the ones they love, you need to grab a copy of Frontier ASAP! This book would be an extra perfect read for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Upright Women Wanted!

DNFing 50% in, no idea what the point of the story is, there's so many characters and nicknames I just got too confused. Also the formatting was terrible for the Kindle app, so many random page breaks.

a space gays western you'll never want to end.
frontier takes us to the distant future where earth has been mostly deserted, when a ship falls and the stranger finds herself separated from the rest of her crew and trying to find her way around a society of people who are fundamentally against her existence and technology that could help her. "scared, alone, and armed, she embarks on a journey across the wasteland to return to her ship, her mission, and the woman she loves."
one of my favorite elements of this story was the fact that the people who stayed on earth were anti-technology and basically Gaia worshippers but also the story telling through the lens of the stranger, the first outsider to come back to earth in 300 years, to find the woman she loves, but having lost her memory..

wow, just wow.

i've seen this recommended to fans of becky chambers & totally agree.

I really wanted to like this one, but it just wasn't for me. I found the storytelling to be a bit chaotic, and I didn't connect with the characters

Thank you to Pride Book Tours and Solaris for a physical ARC in exchange for an honest review and promotion. All opinions are my own.

Frontier follows a mysterious main character. We don’t know anything about this person. Not her name, past or why she’s on the ravaged Earth planet. Most humans left Earth long ago, but the ones who stayed have to deal with a Wild West environment: technology renounced and widespread lawlessness. The book alternates perspectives, but we’re always following our stranger who fell back to Earth separated from the rest of her ship.

I spent a fair amount of this book confused, but it felt very intentional. Think Gideon the Ninth type of confusing. Things were happening, but I didn’t always understand why or how it was important. But when things are finally revealed everything makes sense! The reveal had a great payoff in the end for me.

Even though I was confused at times, I really liked our main character. She was fascinating and always getting into trouble. All we know about her at the beginning is she’s an expert sharpshooter. And gosh does that come in handy through the book! Overall, this was such a fun ride and I would highly recommend it especially for fans of space gays or people who enjoy books with environmental themes.

Rep: Sapphic cis female MC with amnesia, sapphic cis female SC.

CWs: Cursing, death, murder, gun violence, blood, grief, alcohol consumption, injury/injury detail, animal death. Moderate: spaceship crash (car accident), suicide.

I am so disappointed. I was really excited for this space cowboy style story but I was just disappointed the whole time. The book felt like it started in the middle and the whole thing was just to dense for a novella. This maybe could have worked as a full novel but the way it was done just did nothing for me. This is not a novella I would recommend.

This is a tough one to review.
What I liked:
- The premise
- The characters
- The fact that the main character doesn’t get a name until the 71% mark and gets called different things based on her current situation - that was a lot of fun.
- The satisfying ending

What I didn’t like:
- Really just one thing but it’s a big one. Every other chapter or so started from the point of view of a new character or introduces a new setting from a different perspective and it took me out of the story every time. It felt like a stutter - starting and stopping and starting and stopping every other chapter. There was no flow and it just made the whole book less enjoyable. With a different format it could’ve been a 4 star read but because of this I had to bump it down to 3.

The wind blows over a parched, almost dead land. Earth was abandoned, and most fled many years earlier, with malcontents and the loners and the too poor staying, eking out an existence. Humanity expanded outwards over three hundred years, eventually forming an interstellar civilization, with no one interested in returning to a dead planet. We get this backstory through excerpts of reports and statements from someone in the Centralian Empire.

A life pod falls out of the sky one day and falls to Earth, with the survivor setting off a journey , and pursued by a murderous official. She encounters corruption, desperation, religious fervour/zealotry and a deep intolerance for spacefarers, and technology, as that is what is believed to have destroyed much of Earth in its past. Knowing this, the survivor keeps silent about her origins, only saying enough to get directions to where she believes her love might have crash landed as well.

There aren't many people left, but there are settlements ranging from insular villages, to large centres full of abandoned buildings but a thriving culture of skyscraper dwellers. The survivor meets several different kinds of people on her journey, and finds desperation, violence, connivance, kindness and curiosity amongst them.

Interestingly, as our survivor traverses the desolate land she's known by different people by a variety of nicknames: the Courier, the Traveller, Darling, the Guest, etc. (I kept thinking of lone strangers on a horses riding into dusty towns as the survivor walked across the land....) It's an intriguing choice to parcel out morsels of information about the woman, other than her desire to find the woman she loves somewhere on Earth (their romance is slowly revealed, and I loved how strong their connection was).

I really enjoyed this. Grace Curtis gave me a terrific sense of place and belief, and I could hear the wind, feel the heat rising off the sand as I read.

I'm intrigued by the snippets Curtis gives us of the human diaspora, but also how did people manage to survive on Earth for three hundred years, despite climate collapse, little to no working technology and medical treatments restricted to a minority? This book was satisfying, but also left me wanting more, whether about the survivor and her love, or what happened after, and would the Centralian Empire ever turn its eyes Earthward?

Thank you to Netgalley and to Rebellion for this ARC in exchange for my review.

This one fell a little short for me. The ideas were OK and the writing was OK, but I failed to care for the protagonist.

The plot for this book was very appealing. I liked the idea of a western sci-fi on earth. Including a sapphic twist to this was a cherry on top in my opinion. I went into this book very excited about what was to come.

Like I said the western aspect was great. Having the stranger be a western sherif spin off was a really neat idea. I love my bad ass women and right off the stranger was giving those vibes. Unfortunately things quickly went off a different path than I was expecting. First issue starts off with all the side characters. There were many that added nothing to the story and made it more confusing about who the focus needed to be on. We got a lot of focus on the ten year old boy but I’m still lost on what exactly he contributed to the strangers story. I learned more about the drug tortoise than I did the stranger.

We don’t fully learn about the stranger until nearly the end of the book. It’s a cool idea to have the main character mysterious and not really know who they are. Getting snippets and trying to piece everything together yourself was something I hadn’t done before. The issue with this though is you can’t fully connect to a character you know nothing about. This is why I connected more to the drug tortoise. That little guy had range of emotions and I knew enough that allowed me to connect. Maybe if there wasn’t as many side characters it would’ve lead to more opportunities to connect with the main character.

The second dilema was the lack of details. There were a lot of moments I was confused on what was going on and had to reread things to see if I missed something to find out what was missing was the details. There’s quite a few events that happen and you have no idea why they happen. The bookstore going up in flames for example. It added nothing to the plot and there was no explanation of why it happened. There was a lot of talk of grey buildings and objects being dull in color and you don’t find out until way later it’s from the intense sun rays bleaching everything. When I learned that I felt silly for not connecting that earlier but it would’ve been nice to have that explained a little better.

And lastly the world building. I was very lost on all the titles. The stranger having a name change every other chapter did not help either. It took me a second to catch that. It would’ve been helpful for the stranger to stay stranger until we learned her name. We had priests, sheriffs, high sheriff and a thousand more it felt like. I have no problem with that but the issue is if they’re not explained I have no idea what they do. The high sheriff was like a king but I still have no idea what exactly he did as a character. The dancing people in the ships vents got no backstory and I felt like that was a fever dream to be honest. Having the new earthlings explained better would’ve helped. I think it would’ve created a smoother transition of chapters and learning about new characters.

Overall, the idea and thought was there. The execution just wasn’t quite there. It was very original and I enjoyed that aspect thoroughly. I was very much here for the western aspects and I liked how that was mixed with sci-fi.

This was so surprisingly good! I went in with pretty low expectations (the cover? pretty meh. the blurb? super vague.) But I had a feeling it was going to be very Firefly vibes with a happy dose of Sapphic romance - set in the future but with old Western vibes. I was sort of right! This is 100% set firmly on the ground, but our MC is from off-planet and is desperately searching for her shipmates; more specifically, her true love. We follow Kei through different roles, taking on vague names, meeting interesting people, all in her quest to find a communicator to contact her crew. I was never bored, I could never guess what was coming, and I was rooting so hard for the heroine to win and the villain to fall! This is a wonderful read for anyone needing a comfy adventure story.

**Thank you NetGalley and Rebellion for the eARC**

A near-perfect mesh of Science Fiction and Western genres. Neither of which I'm overly fond of but this one may have made a convert of me!
It could get a little confusing at times between changes in names and the timeline, but it's easy to catch on after the first time. I really would have enjoyed more of the backstory, but maybe that's just me.
The characters are so colorful and I wish a couple of them could have stuck around longer. All in all, a cool, well-written tale.
Keep believing in science, love, and the unexpected!
#NetGalley

This book is the pinnacle of hopepunk, a genre I adore. It's got lovers torn apart, trying to make it back to each other, survivors of a damaged planet working on helping it heal, and folks using tech to make the world better for everyone. Of course, it's go great villains, too--people who are scared of and hate tech and medicine and science of all kinds, hypocrites who want to keep tech for themselves, power-hungry abusers of power, and religious zealots who have no idea where their scriptures can from or what they actually mean. It's fast-paced, full of excellent world-building and characters, and has a wonderful, uplifting ending.

Well, It's a western and its sci fi and i definitely thought those elements were blended excellently. There were so many fantastic elements in this book but besides the MC i couldn't enjoy the characters and it led to mixed feelings.

I wanted this story to hit me, and for the first chapter or two, it seemed promising. Then we started the merry-go-round of characters that didn't matter to the story and it started to be problematic. It got to where I didn't trust the characters who were there because I didn't know which ones were staying or going away. It's upsetting because the concept was so stinking good. Its execution was just not on point. And the pay off at the end was jolting, skipping to a completely different POV just as the main character was getting close. It made it difficult to follow. I put the book down, picked it back up, put it down again, finally finished it out of spite.

The concept was great, and once I got to finally know the main character a little, I found her interesting, but I kept getting to like characters that kept not mattering to the story and that got old. If I had known the main character's motivation and had met the person who was the goal, maybe it would have mattered more. And maybe if there were fewer characters that were not integral to the plot. I don't know.

Thanks to NetGalley and Rebellion Publishing for this ARC in exchange for this review.

So the set up of the chapters was a lot different then what I was expecting. The Stranger is the main character. The entire story revolves around her trying to find a way to see if her crew, and specifically her lover, are okay after The Stranger’s ship crash lands on a post apocalyptic earth. I loved that this earth had a different set up then a lot of Sci Fi I’ve seen, that the main religion is Gaia, gravity is her greatest gift because it keeps her children close, and the space travelers of old are sinners and heathens for wanting to leave.
But what I liked about the story most is that for over 75% of the book, she isn’t the main POV. A majority of the chapters begin with the inhabitants of this Earth. That isn’t to say she doesn’t play a big part. We get a glimpse into the lives of these characters as they come into contact with The Stranger at different parts of her journey. By starting with all these other characters the world is fleshed out in a way that wouldn’t exactly be possible if we stuck with The Stranger. Through them we get to see different aspects of The Stranger as well, her dangerousness, kindness, her struggle, her name even changes depending on who meets her. I like this because it made me think of real life, how each person we come into contact with in life will see us differently then the next, due to the circumstance and day.
The love story driving The Stranger’s journey is peppered throughout, her longing and devotion to her lover are evident even if she doesn’t say much. I don’t want to spoil anything, but when we get to look more into her background and see where she comes from her actions make a lot more sense and I was rooting for her to the very end.
A great read over all.
I could honestly see this as a movie as I was reading.

I have to admit, this one started pretty slow for me. But I also don’t typically enjoy westerns. That being said, I really enjoyed this book and once I got into it, I couldn’t put it down.

Frontier has the perfect mix of western and sci-fi, which was so interesting because I don’t think I’ve read any other books like that. The two genres also added so many layers to the plot, it all worked together really well.

I’ll definitely be rereading Frontier and I can’t recommend it enough!

This book was so much fun. If you are a fan of western and sci-fi that’s sapphic, a bit dystopian, and humorous, then you should pick this up. The first part of this book is told through different stories where various side characters encounter our main character, The Stranger. Piercing together The Stranger’s story while getting insight into all these characters is so fun. Eventually, we learn the Stranger’s name, backstory, and motivation , it endend up making me emotional in a way that I didn’t expect.

Grace Curtis captured the real thrill and soul of Westerns in Frontier. I'll admit, this book started off a bit slow for me but as the story started to unfold through what felt like a collection of short stories, I fell in love. Not only is this a tale of one woman's journey through the wasteland that was once our vibrant Earth but also vignettes into other's lives and their personal struggles and passions. The characters come to life with their own personalities and the way they interact with and view our heroine, slowly helping bring to light just who this woman who fell from the stars is and what she wants. Our heroine only wears one hat during her adventure (well and a bonnet) she wears many names as she weaves through the stories of others trying to find the only thing worth finding in a wasteland, love.

Beyond just my love of the characters and the different stories, Frontier absolutely shines with it's world building. Curtis manages to shape the world through things that seem so simple as curses and prayers. She supplements a bit with snippets of history books or cut off transcriptions which weave together to paint a world destroyed by a climate crisis where those who stayed on Earth view those who left as sinners, abandoning the god that is Earth.

It is a beautiful, grit-filled story with just as much tender moments of love and joy as action packed moments of suspense. It is described as The Mandalorian meets Mad Max which I whole-heartily agree with but would like to add that it also made me think of The Princess Bride.

Note: Review will be posted to linked Instagram account (exlibrisCass) on 1/18/2023