Pros: Easy to get through. The more detailed descriptions of alien technology and advanced science were easy to digest. The story on the whole was entertaining.

Cons: The characters and sub-plots occasionally felt trite. The main relationship developing between the MC and the secondary character felt unnecessarily lascivious ( I'm a published erotica author, I'm not prudish); out of place in book that was otherwise solely about first contact in an alien environment, and contained one of those 'weirdly written sex descriptions' that are frequently seen pulled from badly written sex scenes.

I don't feel I ever really got to know any of the side-characters much; they felt like they'd been added in only because the mission would have required that amount of people and so they had to be included and occasionally mentioned.

I'll be reading the second book in the series, only because I feel that the change in circumstances hinted at at the end of Book 1 will provide a better environment for the story to take place, so it might be an improvement over this one. :)

Contains violence: yes (some brief human-on-human violence, other violence moreso)

Contains sexual scenes: yes (graphic descriptions of the act of sex, and a lot of 'horny on main' kind of rambling thoughts of the two chars who were falling for each other)