The Silvers by Jill Smith

 B, captain of the first crewed mission to the Silver Planet, does not think of the planet’s native race as people. Silvers may look human, but their emotional spectrum is severely limited. B allows his team to capture, study, and even kill the creatures.

When B bonds with a Silver called Imms, everything changes. B’s not sure if Imms’s feelings are genuine or imitation, but B’s growing friendship with Imms becomes his anchor in a strange world. Following a shipboard fire that kills most of B’s team, B takes Imms back to Earth. He sanitizes the story of the fire—for which Imms bears some responsibility—so that Imms is recast as its hero rather than its cause.

Life on Earth threatens the fragile connection between the two men. As Imms seeks independence from a bureaucracy that treats him like a test subject, he begins to experience the gamut of emotions—including a love B is frightened to return. And as B and Imms’s story about the fire threatens to unravel, Imms must use all he’s learned about being human to protect B.

Usually I’m not a big fan of sci-fi books; it takes a lot for me to get interested in them just because it’s not my favorite genre.

I can say with this book, my attention was grabbed. Even though the first half of it, I didn’t really like. I pushed myself to keep reading it because I was hopeful that something would pop out and turn the story around completely for me.

The second half of the book does get more interesting for sure. We are following Imms’s transition to Earth, which was really cool. I think the author did a really great job describing the poking and prodding that Imms had to go through on Earth. And I think that the author also did an amazing job describing what Imms was going through with meeting the new people, and dealing with B’s family. And also with B’s character, while I didn’t really enjoy his character, what he was going through was easy to follow and understand.

My one main complaint is the ending of the story. It didn’t really make sense to me. It felt like the author was setting it up for a series, and I’m not sure if I would want to read the next book.