A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Jordan is co-piloting a commercial flight when the pilot drops dead and the plane is sucked up by an alien spacecraft. She is informed that Earth has been destroyed by a comet and the plane was rescued so that its survivors could be re-settled on some other planet. Believing that her young daughter and everyone else she knows is dead, Jordan is devastated... but not too devastated to make time with the handsome alien Kao!

Grant is a former Air Force and commercial pilot, and the realistic flight details are the best part of the book. It was published as a romance, but easily could have been mainstream sf - it's quite plotty and as much about alien politicking as it is about the romance.

My big problem with the book was that the death of one's child is such a monumental event that I couldn't believe in Jordan having any emotional responses other than grief, denial, and numbness. (We know early on that Earth is just fine, but Jordan doesn't learn this until quite late in the story.) While Grant does say that Jordan has to force herself to function for the sake of her crew and passengers, and that her romance is a desperate grasping at life in defiance of despair, I couldn't get past the thought that she thought that her eight-year-old daughter had just died. It made the entire romance not work for me.

It also didn't help that I kept mentally pronouncing the hero's name as Cow. It was later explained that it's actually pronounced K-O, but that just made me picture him getting knocked out.

Diverting but unmemorable.