Junkyard

A Fractured Stars Novella

By: Lindsay Buroker

Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny

McCall Richter works as a skip tracer, tracking down criminals, con men, and people who stop making payments on their fancy new spaceships. Her job description says nothing about locating vast quantities of stolen maple syrup, but thanks to her helpful new android employee, she finds herself tramping through a “sugar house” on a frosty moon full of suspicious characters. The only witness to the crime? The junkyard dog next door.

Junkyard is a stand-alone novella set two years before Fractured Stars.

©2018 Lindsay Buroker (P)2025 Lindsay Buroker

Very enjoyable intro to Fractured Stars series

I enjoy Buroker's sci-fi, especially Star Kingdoms, so I figured I would give this a listen and see what it was like.

The story was good. It was well paced for a novella. The two main protagonists, the heroine and her android sidekick were well flushed out. While I like the main character, I adore her business partner/ android sidekick better. He steals the spotlight.

I liked this story so much that I bought the first full novel in the series. I'm having a difficult time making my way through it as it is more a romance than a sci-fi novel. It tales place in the same universe as Fallen Empire series, but to be honest, I haven't figured out if this series takes place before or after the original series.

But I did enjoy Junkyaed and highly recommend.

Intrigued

I honestly enjoyed this short story. The author is trying to have some neurodivergent representation with the main character. I don’t know if I am the most qualified to weigh in on the accuracy or how good the representation is. I also don’t know if the author is neurodivergent and if this is reflective of some of her experiences or friends. I think this is a balance of some accurate depictions of burnout and exhaustion as well as perhaps some stereotypes but the stereotypes aren’t so strong they make the representation fall flat.

I absolutely love when you have a human and robot friends trope in sci-fi and the dog element adds to it. Buroker does banter in a way that I enjoy and is funny. I love the relationships between her characters. Overall this was highly enjoyable.

The story was more robotic than the actual robot

Ironically, the most interesting character in this novella was the dryly, intentionally funny robot Scipio. The plot, dialogue, and McCall were wooden, robotic, and dull. While I give the author props for building a story around an autistic FMC, her execution was lifeless and utterly failed to endear me to McCall.

I am thankful for this short prequel because it saved me from the full length book 1. For anyone seeking an engaging book featuring an autistic MC, I recommend instead The Sideways Life of Denny Voss.