Hurricane Moon is a literary hybrid: at once a science fiction novel and a romance. It's hardly the first such venture; writers such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Ann Maxwell, and Elizabeth Moon have been exploring this literary territory for years. And some such work has been well worth reading, both as science fiction or fantasy and as romance. I'm sorry to say that Hurricane Moon falls a little short as both.

The focus of a romance has to be on two characters with the potential to become lovers, but prevented from actually doing so by some obstacle. Latner gives us the two characters, Catherin Gault and Joseph Devreze, and a story that ends with their becoming a couple. But there's surprisingly little sense of frustrated passion between them. Latner takes Devreze offstage shortly after the start of the novel, and leaves him there, literally frozen, from the end of chapter one till the start of chapter nine, over 25 percent of the length of the book. And when he does come back, he might as well be frozen still. The reader sees that he and Gault disagree with each other, but not that the disagreement is holding back any great passion. Devreze gets involved with other people, and even impregnates one of Gault's close friends; Gault gets involved with no one, seeming totally immersed in her work.

Latmer offers the reader an external source of passion: The newly colonized planet where the story takes place is actually half of a double planet, one in which both bodies are Earth-sized. As a result, the colonists have a huge "moon" in the sky, which overstimulates the brain centers that evolved to respond to Earth's moon, leading to wildly emotional behavior. This is an ingenious idea, and something interesting might have been done with it. But the emotions don't seem to have much to do with what the characters normally feel, and thus don't reveal much about them—and ultimately, that makes them uninteresting.

On the science fictional side, this lunar influence is just one of a collection of big scientific speculations. We have relativistic starflight to find a new Earthlike planet after Earth becomes uninhabitable; cryonic hibernation leading to genetic damage that shortens lives and threatens to make reproduction impossible; a double planet with massive tides and a huge visible "moon"; the suggestion that the planet has never developed large animal life, contradicted by later discoveries; the evidence that one of the two planetary bodies was massively reshaped by intelligent entities that have now vanished. There are just a few too many ideas, and not quite enough effort to make them add up to anything specific. Nor does it help that the science isn't quite convincing. I was particularly jarred by the repeated references to “planeforming”; presumable this is meant to be "planetforming," a generalization of "terrafroming," but was "corrected" at some point by an incompetent copy editor and not put right in proofreading.

The author's heart really seems to be less in either the science or the romance than in the colonists' religious beliefs. She shows them appealing to their religious heritage from Earth, and trying to come up with new religious rituals to commemorate their lives on a new planet. It's made clear that the colonists have diverse religious backgrounds and that some of them disagree with others' religious formulae—but this, too, is curiously passionless; no one comes to blows over a religious dispute, or insists on rejecting another person for their beliefs, or even walks out of the new ceremonies.

And I'm left wondering, at the end: Here is a single starship, with a population in the thousands, but certainly not in the millions, and yet they're able to sustain all the essential skills of an advanced technological economy. Their numbers are enough to plan to terraform an Earth-sized planet in an entirely new solar system, with the tools they can carry on one ship. And when the unexpected length of their voyage damages their chromosomes, they have a genius on board who can build new human DNA from scratch, founding a new human species. With all that, why are they making this incredibly difficult voyage anyway, rather than staying in the Solar System and terraforming Earth itself? Latner seems to want her love story to be embedded in a physical journey that's also a spiritual quest—but without genuine necessity for such a journey, the spiritual quest seems less than convincing.

In the last analysis, I found this book slow going. I never had enough emotional involvement to feel compelled to turn the next page and see what happened to the characters, as I have with Bujold's Vorkosigan or Moon's Kylara Vatta. The Passions of Gault and Devreze never became real to me. And so I found it unsatisfactory, not only as science fiction, but as a romance.