Did you ever wander how Kirk and Spock first met? No? Well to be honest me neither. Oddly enough though for me, this lack of prior interest in this seemingly momentous event may have proven to be to the advantage of the book. It didn't start out having to overcome my own version of what should have happened. I'd given it a blank slate.

Mind you even if I had pondered this previously I don't think I would have had it occur in a strip joint, with both of the young men running away from security. The seventeen-year-old Kirk had stolen a Starfleet car, although in an attempt to show Starfleet security measures could be circumvented, which could help exonerate his girlfriend - an Academy cadet accused of being involved in stealing dilithium. The young Spock had been selling stolen (or seemingly stolen) Vulcan artefacts as part of his attempt to discover exactly who had been stealing other pieces from the Vulcan Embassy on Earth.

I guess if anyone was going to write this story, then William Shatner should be the one. He is Kirk after all. But does having acted the role in three seasons and seven films make him able to write a good story? Well fortunately in this novel, as with all other Shatner novels he has fine collaborators in Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Together these three have produced a series of fine novels and in this book they have not broken the sequence.

These are never highbrow literature, but then who would ever pick up a Star Trek book to read serious literature. What you get is fun, a tongue in cheek take on James Kirk exploring various bits of his life outside the Trek canon.

A few years back a range of children's books based on the younger versions of the Trek characters during their years in the Academy. This book does something similar, but is written for an adult audience. The characters are as fully fleshed as the series, the action as serious and involved as any other adult Trek novel.

Enjoyable, fun, easy to read, it's an ideal way of recharging the reading batteries, a little bit of mind-candy for the fiction fan.

Synopsis
No one knows Captain James T. Kirk better than William Shatner, who portrayed him throughout Star Trek, the Original Series, and seven subsequent Star Trek feature films, making him in the process one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable science fiction characters on the planet. Since then, William Shatner has continued to explore and expand the career of Captain Kirk in no less than nine successful Star Trek novels. Now he turns his attention to the one part of Kirk's backstory that still remains a tantalising mystery, and one that his fans have always wanted to read - his formative years at Starfleet Academy.