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Thanks to St. Martin's Press for the ARC.

I hate to give such a poor review to an ARC, but this book just isn't ready to be published. I wanted to like it - sapphic cli-fi sounds very appealing to me. But the science was terrible, the characters poorly developed, the plot meandering & frankly unbelievable. The idea for a great story is here with more character development & a good science editor.

Science errors, especially medical, are a huge pet peeve of mine in fiction. Embryo transfer & intrauterine insemination are a big focus here without a basic understanding of how these work. What are "female eggs"? All eggs are female! How about embryo transfer without any embryo harvest or uterine prep? And a near 100% success rate! Then there's the space shuttles. In the near future, people are living on space shuttles (not habitats or stations) that are large enough for individual housing & recreational spaces. With artificial gravity. Where did this technology come from? Really, these & other science errors should have been caught by basic editing.

The main characters (the book follows 3) are all young women - 2 cis, 1 trans, all lesbian. All seem poorly developed to me. Basic character background in some cases isn't introduced until the latter part of the book. None seem to mature over the course of the book, although over 20 years pass. They're all a bit too naive to be believable.

Jacqueline's whole empire also is poorly fleshed out. What exactly are the Yours! spaces? She's hiring young women, new graduates, and students to fill positions of power & leadership, but none seem prepared for these roles. Doesn't she already have a corporate empire? Where are her personal assistants & staff? How did she manage to rig the Inside space's population acceptance without any oversight or notice? No one challenges what she's doing for over 20 years?

So many ideas in this book could have been expanded to create a great story but overall there was too much going on & too little fleshed out for this book to work.