As highly socialized apes, we are fascinated by human interactions. We’re attuned to conflicts, conflict resolution, bargaining, and all manner of seduction. And we love to read about all those things in our fiction. Why, then, aren’t there more books about union organizers? People who organize labor see the gamut of human emotion: greed, hope, disappointment, rage. Their job is to get a large number of people to do something. It’s never an easy task, and it seems like ripe territory for a novelist.

Last year, a new-to-Seattle author named Adam Rakunas published a fun and fast-moving debut sci-fi novel, Windswept, about a union organizer named Padma Mehta who works in Santee Anchorage, a haven for immigrants from across space. Last week, Rakunas published the second book in what is now the Windswept series, Like a Boss, and it improves on the original in part because Rakunas focuses even more on the human interaction that makes Padma’s job so fascinating. Read the rest of this review in Seattle Weekly’s print edition or online at The Seattle Review of Books.

Paul Constant is the co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. Read daily books coverage like this at seattlereviewofbooks.com.