Safety Protocols for Human Holidays

Oh wow, this was delightful! It's a sci-fi romance, set on a ship with a multi-species crew. It's part of the culture of this diverse future that everyone respects and tries to understand everyone else's origins, in the vein of Star Trek DS9 and Mass Effect. But it also reminded me of Farscape and Futurama, in that the aliens and their ideas about humans are truly strange, sometimes in humorous ways.

I picked it up because I like holiday shorts, and because I liked the cover, title, and premise. Because of the cover, I was expecting it to be in the human's point of view. Instead, the PoV character is an alien, Raskli, whose captain assigns her to find out what is bothering Jen, the sole human member of the crew. Raskli is a security officer from a mammal-like race, something like Wookiees; when she learns that Jen is sad because she's missing human holiday celebrations, she has to find out exactly what that means. Raskli's initial annoyance with this task changes quickly to concern for Jen, which slowly grows into affection.

I laughed a lot reading this, mainly because all of the aliens are afraid of humans! They see us as an inherently violent and dangerous species, to the extent that we are stereotyped as villains in TV shows. There is not always reliable info available on humans, because apparently, we couldn't rein in our competitive natures long enough to settle on an official set of data. I don't remember ever encountering a similar concept in a sci-fi story, but it's hilarious, and totally believable!

Raskli enlists the whole ship in finding out more about human holidays, while she and Jen become closer. The romance is friends-to-lovers, and it's very sweet and gentle. Raskli has some anxiety over whether she can help Jen out of her funk, but there's no conflict between them. When they don't understand something ordinary about the other person because of cultural differences, they immediately talk about it, which I really liked. The sex scene is also very nice. The ending feels like happy-for-now, but I believed in their relationship and I can definitely imagine them together forever.

This was my first time reading Angel Martinez, and I'll definitely keep reading her work. I had a huge smile on my face the whole time!