This first installment in Elizabeth Hale’s Emberkind saga is a doorstopper of a novel that seamlessly blends sapphic romance with adventure science fiction.

Growing up in 1966 Indiana wasn’t exactly idyllic for Charlie Wickett and her younger sister Katie. With emotionally detached parents, the two girls fatefully found surrogate mother and father figures in an elderly married couple who lived down the street.

Frank and Helen Beckman give the girls what they need: a safe space, encouragement, and unconditional love. Frank, a WWII vet, sees himself in Charlie, an engineering savant who can fix anything in the Beckman’s home—toasters, lawn mowers, etc.

With the Beckmans’ support, Charlie moves up to more complicated mechanical systems. She eventually attends CalTech and lands a prestigious job at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. But when she touches a fragment of space metal, she finds herself transported to an “intergalactic animal rescue vessel” (the Emberkind CV-0417) crewed by a diversity of aliens. The cook, for example, looks like a “seven-foot bear in an apron.” Charlie, who is gay, is immediately enthralled by the lilac-haired captain, a woman she eventually learns has experienced as much loss, sadness, and self-doubt as Charlie has.

Although tagged as a romance, the novel’s soul is a poignant story of two women’s epic journeys of self-discovery: “The hard part isn’t figuring out who or what you are. The hard part is purposefully deciding you’re allowed to be that person.” Readers who aren’t moved throughout this emotionally incendiary narrative may need to check themselves for a pulse.

Minor criticisms include an overly long slow burn—the first kiss is 600 pages in!—and a sex scene so unnecessarily long (more than 30 pages) it becomes monotonous.

Juicy cliffhangers and unresolved plot threads abound at novel’s end: What happened to Katie? Is the old captain of the Emberkind, missing for years, still alive? Fans of genre-hybridized stories will be eagerly awaiting the sequel.

Also available in hardcover, ebook and audiobook.