Thank you to BookSirens for allowing me read and review this book! This is now the second book by Chani Lynn Feener that I’ve read and I’m happy to say that I’ve enjoyed both.
Disclaimer: I received this e-arc through the author and BookSirens in exchange for a free and honest review. The book cover and details are taken from Goodreads and the content warnings are taken from The Storygraph; from me reading the book, or from others’ reviews. I try my absolute best to find the cover art/designer but unfortunately I am not always able to do so. The page numbers/audio hours are taken from the version that I’m reading from (if an e-arc, the digital version then). The featured image is my own. All opinions expressed are my own. This is a spoiler-free review with slight references towards the spoilers, be they plot or characters.
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Title: A Sea of Endless Light
Author: Chani Lynn Feener
Number of Pages: 368
Year Published: 2022
Publisher: Chani Lynn Feener
Cover Art/Designer: Ampersand Book Cover Designs
Age Demographic: Adult
Genre: Fantasy ~ Science Fiction ~ Mystery ~ Action and Adventure
Rep: Pansexual main character. M/M main romance.
Stars: 
Links: Goodreads || The Storygraph
Copy: E-arc (BookSirens)
CW/TW: (Taken from The Storygraph) Death, Violence, Medical Experiments.
A flirty detective and a secretive ship captain fight their attraction for one another.
Fox Axford has been tasked with capturing a feared thief who has been terrorizing the Hild Empire, not flirt with the impassive captain he’s been unlikely paired with.
When Fox is assigned to the Hild case by the Intergalactic Police Force, he doesn’t anticipate it taking very long. He’s known for his wits and charm and is confident enough in his abilities to have this thing solved and closed before the week is through. Except, he didn’t account for how distracting working with Captain Jiro Arc was going to be.
Jiro Arc has a secret he’s been keeping all his life, one that he’s never wanted to share with anyone. Until the day Detective Fox appears.
Having lived quietly climbing the ranks of the Hild Comets, Captain Jiro is used to rebuffing attention with his steely disposition. All of his efforts seem to have the opposite effect on the detective, however, who only seems more and more interested in Jiro and his personal life as time goes on. Their main task is to find the mysterious thief Shilling and bring him to justice, but Jiro has an agenda of his own, one that might ultimately lead to him betraying Fox, whether he likes it or not.
Fox grows even more conflicted after meeting the thief they’re after. Shilling isn’t at all what he expected, and when he finds himself sympathizing with the enemy, Fox is forced to acknowledge that there may be things he doesn’t yet know or understand about the vast universe, and the people living in it.
This book is a standalone featuring one charming detective and the captain he’s set his sights on. It is a slow burn, forbidden romance with depictions of violence (though mild) and explicit sexual scenes not suitable for all readers. While this book is set in the same universe as A Bright Celestial Sea, it is a complete standalone with an all new cast of characters. You do not have to read both books, but if you choose to they do not have to be read in any particular order since there are no connections between the two.
This is the type of sci-fi I like the most – casual sci-fi with a lot of “Earth inspiration”. I don’t even really care if it didn’t make sense that there was a Jacuzzi in a hotel room on another planet; or if they spoke exactly like people on Earth do – like give me all of that! I think that’s why I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. If someone told me this was like a “casual” sci-fi rather than a hard (to understand) sci-fi I would’ve read it earlier.
I enjoyed the amount of action that the author wrote in the book. It wasn’t too much and it was easy to follow. Easy to follow for here means as much as I do love science fiction (in any format), I often sit there and go “huh?” when I’m reading a sci-fi book. You know those Tiktok videos where it goes something like “And then we traveled to dhdhgjgj and we spoke to wjergjefe” – because it’s making fun of fantasy books with weird/difficult names? That’s me but with sc-fi. I have no issue reading Fantasy and their names, it’s most of what’s in sci-fi that just has me scratching my brain 😂.
I liked Fox Axford basically just from the start. He was snarky and I love snarky characters. I’m guessing Chani Lynn Feener likes writing a lot of snarky/sarcastic characters because they were in her other book I read recently too (Abandoned Things). She writes them well, I must say! I think sometimes you get those characters who are trying too hard to be sarcastic and you can tell when you have a case of that – which isn’t the case here.
Fox was a fun character to get to know. His motivations were clear and he wore his heart on his sleeve – which I liked to see. He knew what he wanted and he just went for it, sometimes recklessly, but passionately either way. I don’t think I can ever get tired of characters who know what they want and make plans to go for it. Okay, maybe if the character is a full villain, then I’m not so happy. Grey villains get a pass, of course 😄.
I think at the very beginning I didn’t really like Jiro Arc and I was glad that that quickly turned around because he was also such a great character. He didn’t show a lot of his personality until you got to know him so I enjoyed getting to know more of him. I liked that he only showed that he, too, could be snarky but only after you got to know him – which is true for a lot of people, actually.
Shilling is another character that pops up and he’s also just a super fun character. I think the author had some fun creating him and writing him. He originally comes off as carefree but he’s revealed to be much more and I ended up enjoying his character more than I thought I would.
The relationship was very cute and just like in Abandoned Things I was grinning a lot because they’re cute, all right? They matched together well and they had a lot of chemistry – which, of course, is always a good thing. I like it when I can tell the author had fun writing characters/their banter and this is definitely one of those cases.
Dawon and Nova were two characters that while I clocked their personality early on I also would’ve liked to know more about them. I liked the easy banter the two of them had with Fox. Sure, Dawon is Fox’s cousin so they already know each other but all three of them had that easy banter between them – something I love to see in books and never get bored of it.
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Are you a hard sci-fi partaker or more like me with the idea of “casual sci-fi”? it’s not that I don’t watch “hard sci-fi”, because I do; it’s just easier for me to keep up with the science fiction that’s not so… science-y 😂. Anyway! If you’re looking for an easy sci-fi with a fun mystery and a cute romance, I recommend this one!
DB's Guide to the Galaxy 
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