This is an interspecies romance which may not work for everyone. I feel it is necessary to add a disclaimer here. Soon, Sarah’s friendship with Sanford blossoms into something more. She also meets Sanford (or Nk’o’sa’knko, if you can pronounce it), and his son T’aki there, and a lovely camaraderie develops between the three of them. The aliens at the camp at first distrust her good intentions to help them, but she perseveres and wins their friendship – or at the very least, their grudging respect – painful by painful inch.

At first, I thought Sarah would turn out to be an annoying Mary Sue (she was definitely no warrior-like Amber from Gann) but her determination and her compassionate nature soon won me over. She is one of those do-good, optimistic types, and is soon mockingly nicknamed “Pollyanna”. Sarah Fowler, our heroine, signs up as a social worker at the immigration camp at Cottonwood. Smith does refer to a few such information leakages to the outside world, which in the beginning seems to imply that the humans did not protest against the alien abuse at the camps. The organization which runs these camps had forbidden entry to outsiders, so that the truth about the state of the aliens held there did not leak out. There, they were forced to live in abject squalor, without dignity, without basic amenities, and were often the subject of perverse genetic and biological experiments. The aliens hoped to seek food, shelter and alliance, but instead they were labeled as dangerous, violent and unintelligent, and packed off to concentration-like camps. Twenty years ago, an alien spaceship came to Earth, only to be stranded here. It was difficult to read Cottonwood without similar expectations, but that would be doing the book an injustice. Smith when I read The Last Hour of Gann, one of the finest science fiction romance books I have ever read.

Cottonwood by R. Lee Smith