I like to consider an indie book review in three sections: 1) plot, characters, locations, 2) quality of writing, especially dialogue, 3) editorial accuracy. It’s on the basis of these categories that I figure out what sort of ‘score’ to rate a novel, using the Amazon 5-star method.

Bren's Blessing by Pearl Tate gets four stars. Here’s why.

Actually, it might be easiest to set out why it loses one star. A small part of that is due to some editorial errors: some that spring to mind are a sentence that isn't a sentence' 'effect' instead of 'affect', the horrendous phrase 'one of the only', and occasional typo (including the one Word makes worse by capitalising after dialogue - see my fourth post on writing dialogue). This might sound like a lot but in fact there weren't many. I certainly wasn't sitting there with my editorial antennae beeping away furiously: just every now and then I though, 'Oops.' Any decent editor would have picked all these up.
   A slightly larger part of the missing star was simply that I found bits of the plot/characterisation hard to swallow. The basic idea is rather good. I liked the notion that a female human meets up with a male alien and - unexpectedly - their point of contact turns out to be sex. It wasn't politics, academic or a power struggle. It was sex. That said, I thought that the female protagonist, Hannah, went from being a space nerd to a woman constantly thinking about sex and relationships a bit abrupt. I thought the aliens were a little too 'human', too. Their emotions closely resembled those of humans. At one point one of them crosses his legs while sipping a cup of tea. Ho-hum.
  Enough of the moaning. The writing is good - clear and refreshingly free of awkward phrases and silly descriptions. The sex scenes are as advertised - realistic and hot. The alien creatures that Hannah has the misfortune to meet at one point are well drawn; the aliens themselves are well drawn (apart from my moan that they are perhaps too human). My only complaint about the writing is that Hannah uses 'super' to describe some things (eg 'super heavy'), which doesn't sound like a phrase an astronaut would use.
  Would I recommend this book? Yes - if you are up for reading explicit sex scenes. There's nothing in the book that should put you off. (That's one of my main worries when I pick and choose an indie book.) It's a bit of harmless fun and I enjoyed it.