Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: Evergreen
AUTHOR: Cari Z.
LENGTH: 59 pages
RELEASE DATE: January 13th, 2020
BLURB:
Cy Konstantin and Scottie Andrews are supposed to make Project Evergreen’s one-way trip to Mars together. A near-fatal accident during training knocks Cy into a coma for half a year, and out of Project Evergreen. He works his way back to Scottie’s side, but he can’t rejoin the mission. Once Scottie leaves, they’re destined to live millions of miles apart for the rest of their lives.
A deadly accident on Mars might spell the end of their distant romance, though—or be the thing that saves it.
REVIEW:
I found this free-read unusually appealing in that it embodied a work of near future science fiction with some of the issues of near past emigration.
This speculative fiction incorporates the premise that those who are lucky enough to go to Mars will NOT be returning. It brought to my mind an interview that I once saw with an old Russian woman who immigrated to the USA as a young girl. In later years her mother had written to her that seeing her aboard the ship was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. “It was like seeing you go into your grave.” That was how Trans-Atlantic immigration worked in the early 1900’s. It was almost certain that those you bid farewell to might never be seen again.
Cy Konstantin and Scottie Andrews’ relationship is a bit taboo, but not because it’s M/M. It’s just that folks in the Evergreen program are discouraged from any relationships that might distract from their training. When one of these guys is injured and cannot go, the other is forced with a painful choice of partings. Leave behind the man he’s just starting to develop a relationship with, or stay and force his only family, his sister to leave him behind. Resolving that dilemma, and the one that arises later is plenty for a full-length novel to deal with. That it was handled as well as it was in under 60 pages was pretty extraordinary.
Yes, this three chapter tale was fast paced and involved a lot of telling rather than showing since it contained so many plot details in so few pages. The sex isn’t completely fade to black but it’s clearly not the main intent of this work. Not all the scientific details were right and apparently some Russian dialogue was a bit flawed. And yet for a sci-fi novella this was a sweet read and it was fun to spend an hour that might as easily have been introduced as a twilight zone episode but with Zachary Quinto filling in for Rod Serling.
It’s less than an hour’s reading time and free on Amazon. If you’d like to add a bit of Sci-fi and still keep to a strictly romance diet, this might be the novella for you.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS:
Free on Amazon