Author website.

Ruthi and Jules Johnson are small-time con artists, making a living by pool sharking on luxury space cruise ships. Jules falls in love with a rich mark named Esteban Mendez-Yuki and tells him the truth. He reacts as you'd expect and breaks things off with her. Jules discovers she's pregnant and decides to keep it and that she wants nothing more to do with Esteban. Ruthi disagrees and sends a letter to the rich mark asking for money for the kid; she receives the expected letter back from his lawyers talking about extortion.

And so Ruthi does what anyone would do: she commits identity fraud, passes herself off as a rich debutant years younger than she actually is, and decides to trap the rich guy into betrothing her, violating the contact, and get enough money for the Johnsons And New Baby to live happily on. Unfortunately, she did not plan for the rich guy's hot older half-sister Sol Mendez-Yuki, who has gotten in debt to Space Mafia because of her other half-brother's college fees, and can't pay it off because all her money is tied up in trying to break into the kosher grocery business via a warehouse full of frozen ducks.

This is a delightful romp. I, who am not usually great on the uptake when it comes to "look these characters are attracted to each other" can feel it coming off the page in spades. Highly recommended! Perfect femslash book of everyone's dreams! Bullet-points behind cut.

• This book is such a great example of how to set up for a potential sequel but not leave things feeling like, if there's no sequel, there wasn't an ending. The book has a great ending! Everything is tied off! But it ends with them moving on to the next chapter, with plenty of questions about what's going to happen then. So it's not sequel bait! But if there is a sequel, it's perfectly set up for it: what is going to happen on Earth? Will Sol and Ruthi's relationship last? Will Esteban gain a clue and come after them to try to relate to Jules on her terms, or try to be present for their kid, or has he given up on the relationship for good? Will Ruthi and Jules visit with their family in Borough Park and let them know their mother died two decades ago? Will Jules get to go to college? Will they find Felix The Other Half-Brother Art Student?
  
  But if we don't find out, we don't find out! And that's fine, because the plot of the book was the plot of the book and it all tied off nicely.



• I love how Jewish this book is! You have, on the one hand, Ruthi and Jules, whose mother was, it seems like, some kind of Chassidish (I am basing this entirely on the description of what Ruthi remembers seeing people wearing in a photo that her mother showed her back when her mother was alive, and her mother died when she was eight), and ran off to the stars and became a con artist and taught them Yiddish, and everything is great, this is cool. And then Sol pipes up with "you may not know about how hard it is to transport things in the kosher food system" and that is also fantastic.
  
  But on the OTHER HAND: a major plot point revolves around the fact that there is a PUBLIC KESUBAH SIGNING CEREMONY, IF AFTER WHICH YOU BREAK IT, YOU OWE FINANCIAL DAMAGES THAT ARE LAID OUT IN THE KESUBAH.
  
  Ah, my mistake, it's not a kesubah, it's *checks notes* an engagement contract. Which is negotiated in advance and a lot of contract elements are decided on by each other, but also there's a general template for it. And then publicly signed, at which point you are considered married enough that breaking it off means the person at fault for it has to PAY UP MOTHERFUCKER.
  
  Also during this public ceremony the woman is wearing a veil and then removes the veil before signing. And the engagement contract is read out loud so everyone knows what's in it.
  
  How many characters in this book are Jewish? IDK, but this worldbuilding sure is. :P



• Also a third thing on that, which is 1A: I was happy going on with Ruthi's mom's baggage that she left to Ruthi as just being part of character building and backstory, but I was SO HAPPY when it turned out to be a Checkov's gun and Ruthi had to dress up frum and speak Yiddish and pretend to be a frum widow who needed to move all that kosher frozen duck after her previous transport partner fucked her over, in order to help Sol. THAT WAS SO GOOD. Backstory stuff being used for necessary plot stuff!!!! Important life skills: being able to speak Yiddish and tie a tichel.



• I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about Ruthi's mom. She never went back to her family and IDEK if she even wrote them, even after being widowed/possibly abandoned by her husband (I do not trust Ruthi's memory on this, I treat it as potentially influenced by her mom telling stories about him) and living as a con artist with two kids. She did not tell Ruthi and Jules that if she died, they should do their best to make their way back to Borough Park, even though it would be a long and difficult journey, that they'd be safer. She didn't do that! She left them her family's address as of when she left, told them they could look them up if they needed to, and that was it.
  
  HOW BRUTAL AND BITTER WAS YOUR BREAK, WHAT HAPPENED, and omg if there's a sequel, I want to see the family interact with Your Relatives The Con Artists.



• (also WHY DON'T they have inherited Earth citizenship, why is that something they need to marry Esteban to get for the kid, I have QUESTIONS, do they just need to fill out forms, have they ever actually looked into this, do they have it and not know, are they not eligible because reasons????)



• So I've started assessing books based on their male characters, an assessment that can sort of look like this:
  
  "There are two kind of people in the world: men and women. One of them is bad and that's women. Women are bad." "That's misogynistic. It's the men who are bad." "Oh, right, thanks for the correction. Men are bad."
  
  And the assessment is how much does the book's characterization seem to agree with this; if you swapped all the characters, would the book seem incredibly misogynistic?
  
  Anyway, this book doesn't need that, there's so few male characters, it's like asking why a m/m romance slashfic with prominent sex scene doesn't pass the Bechdel test: it's not supposed to, because that's not the story that it is. This is femslash. There's like four named men in this entire book, and the only one with serious page-time is Esteban, who doesn't deserve what Ruthi is doing to him, and while everyone except Ruthi agrees about this, even his sister Sol doesn't bother to actually stop Ruthi because she knows that all Ruthi is doing is taking him for a lot of money, and Esteban does not actually care about Ruthi's put-on character, and quite frankly he doesn't really care about the money, and it's not him who'd really lose it, it's the company.
  
  Esteban is also a fantastic character, very realistic, you feel simultaneously sorry for him and also understand why Sol is not actually lifting a finger to help him not get temporarily engaged to a con artist.



• Okay, you know what, Esteban is getting his own special bullet point because ESTEBAN IS RIGHT, ACTUALLY.
  
  So one thing I love is that Ruthi is so biased about Jules and their own con artist life that she does not, for a single moment, stop to think about things from Esteban's point of view and realize that Rich Boy Has A Point.
  
  Esteban is traveling on this luxury cruise and meets a nice woman named Julia! They hit it off! Esteban proposes marriage! And then Julia says "surprise, I'm a con artist, everything I told you about myself is a lie". Esteban dumps her. He later gets a letter saying "Julia's pregnant, it's yours, give us money" and he doesn't believe it and his lawyers respond saying, essentially, fuck off.
  
  Now, Ruthi is mad about this because she knows Jules and she knows that Jules was very serious about him and in love and going to run off with Esteban to go to Earth where Esteban will throw over his Rich Boy Destiny Of Inheriting A Company He Doesn't Want and will instead be a PhD student at some university to be determined later, and Jules will get to go to school, and they will live happily ever after.
  
  Esteban... has no reason whatsoever to trust Jules at all.
  
  Now, is Esteban the architect of his own downfall? Absolutely yes. The fact that Ruthi was able to con him so obviously that even she was bored of the con (while Sol saw through Ruthi basically immediately) and that he clearly saw the space she took up rather than the person she was projecting herself to be, and went along with the whole thing on the rebound without engaging his brain at all, that says a lot about the person he is.
  
  Esteban's the kind of guy who is deeply lucky he's rich, while at the same time, chafing at being rich. He wants to go live his dream but has no concept of self-preservation or what things cost or how to relate to people who are not exactly in his social sphere. But he has also not been given the opportunity to do that, and at some point, you have to ask does he want to live the dream or just dream the dream.
  
  Of course, Sol has that problem, too, and it bites her when she actually tries it. But hey, she tried it.
  
  And Esteban's obliviousness to things that do not interest him are part of the reason Sol loves him! Because Sol was getting a lot of social friction for where she came from and being the daughter from the previous relationship and not fitting in, and Esteban has always been on her side without knowing that there's a side to be on, because he loves her and does not notice that friction at all, because he does not care. And sometimes when you're dealing with a lot of social friction, the best person to have as a friend is someone who doesn't even notice the thing everyone mocks you for.
  
  And his obliviousness is also probably how he ended up with Jules in the first place, too. (We don't know; Ruthi goes "yeah I wasn't paying much attention and I don't know why or how Jules and Esteban got together" because she never at any point thought the whole thing was real or would last.)



• Speaking of moms and their legacies, wow, Esteban and Sol's mom. What the fuck was her story, what the fuck was her deal, why when she wrote her engagement contract was she relying on her husband kicking the bucket first so that Sol could inherit anything, instead of having Sol get adopted along with it? Because Sol not actually getting adopted by step-dad not only fucked her over when her mom died, but seems to have been fucking her over long before that, including that she went into educational debt to her step-father's company, while I have to assume that Esteban's stuff was all fully paid for. How much did she care about Sol herself?
  
  The mom was a very successful gold digger/trophy wife, who possibly would have benefited from being a better con artist. How the hell did that happen? How did she not end up divorced????
  
  But yeah, Esteban found out about Jules and went "I have just avoided becoming my dad, yay me, I'm so lucky she didn't wait to tell me until after we got married" and did not stop and think "hey why didn't she wait to tell me until after we got married, maybe that means she's genuine about this?"



• This book is so good! If you were ever like "what if Leverage cared about collateral damage", then I have news for you about Ruthi learning the butler's name and feeling sorry for him about to be collateral damage (he does not become collateral damage).



• This book is ALSO so good with paralleling situations. You have parallel scenes with Esteban and Sol with Ruthi and the VAST DIFFERENCES between their interactions, between Esteban treating his life like a script he has to get through so he can go back to his soil experiments, versus Sol actually talking to her and listening to her responses, and relating to her on a personal level, and trusting her, and them being honest with each other, and meanwhile by the end of the book Esteban still does not know Ruthi's actual name.



• Esteban had SO MANY CHANCES to start giving a fuck! He had SO MANY CHANCES to realize that he was being gold-dugged by a gold-digger, something you would think 1) he would have been trained from youth how to identify, and 2) just had a near miss with! But he is so focused on himself and what he cares about, and does not look beyond surface deep on anything else, that when he sees a woman who, he assumes, has been fully vetted as The Right Kind Of Woman, who then treats him in a nice way, and fulfills all the social expectations, and anyway, his dad is dying, and his older sister who would be perfect to inherit and is doing all the work that Esteban has been avoiding, isn't being allowed to inherit*, and so he does, actually, need to marry a woman who can manage him and the company, and here's an heiress who does all the right things and says all the right things and can interact as a rich person with all his rich person relatives... well, why look a gift horse in the mouth. Let's get married.



• *I SPENT THE ENTIRE TIME WONDERING if Esteban actually had some secret plan to, as soon as his dad died, to say to the lawyers "I adopt Sol however it's possible for me to do that, I give her the company, good bye, I'm moving to Earth, so long." Unfortunately his dad didn't die in this book so I guess I will never know if Esteban had thought more than a few days ahead about anything.



• Also if you were ever like "but how could you do the whole Lost Heir scam in space where they have space stuff and also hand-wavy faster than light travel", just add in realism about travel times! Yes, yes, there's faster than light travel... but it's not instantaneous. It will still take three months for anyone to actually background check Ruthi's assertions that she's Evelyn Ojukwu, and this person is from so far out and there's no One Centralized Posh Boarding School so she can be pretty confident that no one will say "I went to school with Evelyn Ojukwu and you aren't her!". And boom, as long as her con is done within three months -- which is has to be, since she's trying to do it without Jules finding out -- she's fine!



• But, ah. There's still the media to consider! Which is how Jules finds out about it: Ruthi is ending up in all the tabloids standing next to Jules's Ex, and Jules is obviously checking the tabloids for how her ex is doing, and since she's on a closer planet, she can show up in the nick of time.



• Did I mention the femslash? I need to mention the femslash even more. It is so good, it is so well-done, their attraction is so real and so felt, their relationship builds so well, they have no reason to trust each other, they put themselves at risk to help each other, and Sol finds the one person in the entire Space Monte Carlo willing to be in a relationship with her even though Sol is Rich People Poor Because Her Asshole Step-Dad Treats Her Like A Promising Employee Not A Daughter.



• Also, speaking of which: I love that this book gives me an ugly girl! Louanne Hachi is rich and would have absolutely married Sol back when it looked like Sol could inherit but, ah, well, you see, now that she won't inherit, it just wouldn't be prudent to get married, everyone does have to marry rich, for obvious and necessary purposes which we won't spell out but I'm sure, well, you understand, it's about mergers, and it's not the done thing to marry someone not rich, that's called a gold-digger -- when a rich will only marry rich, that's not gold-digging, that's silly, that's just marrying within the class -- and just look at Old Mateo who married a gold-digger and brought in her daughter, Sol, who just so happens to be the best at this game and not the actual bio-son, but-- well, we're friends, you know. Just friends.
  
  And she's ugly and she's a well-rounded perfect character who has her own goals and ambitions and will help when it pleases her, and she's basically the most helpful rich person in this book who isn't Sol -- who hangs with the rich folks in their social circle and flirts with all the girls but even though they don't treat Sol like she's lesser, she's not good enough to marry -- and I love her, she's wonderful.



• You have these two people in this book who will not marry down: Esteban and Louanne. And Esteban has a point about not marrying someone who has been lying to you for your entire relationship. But Louanne? What's going on in her budget spreadsheet and pocketbook that marrying someone who can be CEO tomorrow isn't a good idea? Especially since it seems like Louanne was going to marry in to the family? Why can't Sol marry into the Hachis instead?
  
  I understand "love isn't enough", believe me. But Sol is good enough to run her step-dad's company while knowing she won't inherit it; no one's concerned about her sabotaging anything out of bitterness or for her own enrichment. All of her problems would be solved, actually, if she'd just embezzle!
  
  Sol is honorable and chivalrous and gets into debt by trying to help someone, and can't get out of it because she's trying to become independent of her family -- all the things that Esteban won't try and don't do. (Possibly because he doesn't need to.)
  
  But she's also marked, by coming into this as a step-daughter and not biologically; by having the wrong accent at first and the wrong opinions and the wrong father. And the rich debutants of her social circle could ignore that and treat her as marriageable when it looked like she might inherit, but once it became clear that she wouldn't -- well, she's still one of us, but she's not really one of us, you know how it is. Lovely to hang out with, perfect for a flirt, but let's not take this seriously. No one's going to marry her. She has no company to bring with her into it.
  
  There's a lot to be said about mercenary motivations and which are considered socially-acceptable and which are not.
  
  Nobody in this book gets married in the book, but you can see the shape of all the marriages and broken engagements and broken promises around it, and they all have to do with money: who has it, who wants it, who needs it, and where is it going to come from.



• From this last statement, I want to side-track into Ways This Understands Jane Austen More Than Things That Are Actually Trying To Imitate Jane Austen (This Is Not One Of Them), where marriage is also fundamentally about money. Emotions and feelings are great! Because it's important to get along with your spouse! But if you go into it just with your pants-feelings and with no eye on the pocketbook-feelings, you are in the wrong genre, buddy, and have I got some news to you about where food and shelter come from.
  
  This is a book that takes marriage seriously as a financial institution. Oh and also everyone in the posh scene calls each other Mr and Miss all the time, even when they're practically engaged. Because it's a world where being Miss Ojukwu, heiress is important.



• I have not talked much about Space Mafia but I just love how Ruthi has to handle Mafia Guy all the time and juggle the danger and make sure she always lets him win, because it's too dangerous not to let him win, and how apparently she's been doing that since she was, idek, ten? Back when she and Jules were owned by a gang after their mom died, even then she could beat him at cards and did not dare do so. And then the denouement depended on manipulating Mafia Guy because he has to win and she has to fold and lose, and how to make that work so she still won enough to save Sol from having all her corporate secrets read via brain scan.
  
  Sol, btw, really did not seem like she was trying all that hard to get out of being hugely in debt to Mafia Guy, even knowing the payment he was going to take would hurt the company and had a chance of really damaging her; there were plenty of things she could have done to try to either remove or reduce the debt, even with having all the kosher ducks in storage. I wondered a little if a part of her was perfectly happy to let her step-dad's company flame out via corporate espionage after the only reason she'd gone into debt in the first place was to save her brother on her bio-dad's side from educational debt... the same thing she is dealing with because of her step-dad (one assumes she is dealing it with to a much less extent than a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks is but one does not, in fact, know that). And as for the risk to her? I got the impression she'd be willing to flame out, considering how she drove that motorcycle.



• This was a great book to read over Shavuos, my very own Book of Ruth. And don't think I didn't notice the "blink and you'll miss it" where you go, I go. I see you what you are doing, Rebecca Fraimow. :p