Like many of McIntyre's works, this seems to bridge the gap between a very classic and old fashioned Trek story and the modern fanfiction-ish stories that I feel like I usually read. I really valued the interesting twist on the old tired "generation ship" plot, and I liked the character of Stephen, for all that he's not very canonical. A Good Book, is my summary.

I'm a Trekie, but only of the original series. I used to have a crush on Jim Kirk, when I was a pre-teen. JSYK.
In this first book of McIntyre's series, Jim Kirk gets his captain promotion and his first starship. The crew have all served under Capt Pike, who has been promoted to admiral. Spock, Uhura, Scotty, have served on the Enterprise. Kirk is only 29 years old. Janice Rand is 19 years old, and the opposite of the beautiful, assured woman playing on the show. It was fascinating to compare the book's characterization with that of the TV show.
I thoroughly enjoyed this and I will be reading the second book in the series soon. ( )

This one has grown on me over the years, and provides a weird backwards character development that I'm finally beginning to appreciate. ( )

Overly-dramatic, plodding at times, and with less character development than I would have expected for the "first Enterprise adventure", this novel was surprisingly disappointing. More times than not, I found myself skipping some of the really slower parts with the hope that things would pick up. Unfortunately, they really didn't.
I really wanted this book to work because I thought there would be some interesting backstories to the creation of the Star Trek "band" that fans know and love. Well...there wasn't nearly enough of that and way too much of an uninteresting side story weaving together a vaudevillian troupe, a renegade Klingon, and a "first contact" with a group of winged creatures.

As a fan of the show and franchise, maybe I expected too much out of this book. I'll leave it to others to judge and add their comments or reviews. ( )

Vonda McIntyre's Star Trek- Enterprise: The First Adventure proposes a hypothetical first mission for Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise following Captain Christopher Pike's promotion to Commodore. McIntyre's writing captures the spirit of the original series, both in terms of story and tone, but she makes many plot decisions that either ignore or significantly alter the established canon from the original series and the existing films at the time of her writing. Examples of these changes include the backstory between Kirk and Gary Mitchell (previously explored in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second Star Trek pilot), the inclusion of a young Ensign Pavel Chekov on Kirk's first mission (Chekov first appeared in "Amok Time," during the second season of the original series), and Spock's cousin, Stephen, a "pervert" who seeks out emotional experiences (foreshadowing Spock's brother Sybok, who first appeared three years later in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier). Additionally, as Pocket Books published this prior to the beginning of Star Trek: The Next Generation, McIntyre was left to invent her own version of Klingon society, in which the empress is a figurehead in a society controlled by oligarchs. Anyone familiar with the rest of the franchise will find these elements jarring. Even though this long predates J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of these characters, McIntyre's Kirk reads more like a performance by Chris Pine than a young William Shatner. With that said, the story may entertain casual readers or those able to keep in mind its date of publication. ( )