This book contains:

• Domestic violence
• Emotional torture
• Sexual harassment.

Alyvia is the main character that we follow, although the other members of the Merry Maids also feature heavily.

Alyvia is pretty young, just graduating “college”, is going into her first job and carries with her an immense burden with her family history and powerful telekinesis powers.

Alyvia is scouted in her final week at the Academy and lands herself her dream job out in the stars, despite not ranking in the top 5 of her graduating class. Her first mission takes her to meet the Council before chasing after the pieces of a machine known as, “Starkiller”.

Throughout this first book, we begin to find out about the Merry Maids, their histories and hints at how the Council works.

I read this first in the BBNYA 2022 competition as an excerpt, and when it didn’t make it through to the next round, I just had to ask Stephanie for a copy because I could tell it was a book I’d love.

I wasn’t wrong!

I absolutely flew through this with the fast pace of the action scenes broken up by careful character development that had me wondering and guessing where things were going to go. While I initially thought the quest would be over and done in one book making a new quest for each book, I quickly realised that wasn’t going to be the case with the detail and depth Stephanie included.

The one thing I found as I read the book, was that I was confused about the “powers” that were available and why some had powers, but others didn’t. And the various types of positions people were in and what decided that they’d go into those positions. While I got a sense of this (still not 100% confident) after reading all 3 books in this series, it’s definitely something I would’ve liked included here to help with the world building.