Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

The Princess Will Save You

By Sarah Henning.

This is based on The Princess Bride, except with an Adventure Girl princess. Princess Amarande is sixteen when her father dies unexpectedly--presumably from someone else poisoning her. Because her father never changed the laws to let her inherit in full without being married, Amarande is immediately getting harassed by all and sundry to marry one of the other nearby rules--one of whom is an ancestor of hers and already married, even, ew/? and the best option is a jerky venal prince around her own age with a younger scheming brother who's even worse and a dowager queen who doesn't want to give up the throne.

But everyone already knows that Ama's heart is with Luca the stableboy, from a neighboring kingdom where the rulers were killed and taken over by a warlord that her dad never actually did anything about for....some reason. Anyway, it's so Everybody Can See It that one of the royals--pretty obvious which one--puts some "land pirate" teenagers up to kidnapping Luca to force the princess into marrying their guy. But Ama's NOT gonna do what they say, and immediately rides off to rescue him. The good news is that Amarande is well trained in fighting, battle, swords, etc. The bad news is that (a) she hasn't really fought against anyone trying to kill her before and (b) you know what they say about no plan surviving contact with the enemy.... so things go somewhat awry, somewhat akin to the movie plot. 

Ama lives in a predictably sexist world that she wants to thwart, and does her best to do that, under the circumstances of being on the run and whatnot for most of the book. 

On the weak side:

• I don't feel like Amarande and Luca's true love got a whole lot of time to develop. It's an established quiet thing they haven't openly spoken of before--fine. But they have one moment of romance between them and otherwise...not so much? Both of them are nice and all--Ama being fierce primarily and Luca being the nice kind sweet guy--but I don't think anyone gets a whole lot of character sketching out, really, except here and there.
• Not exactly a book with humor in it, so if you expected it to be more like Princess Bride, it's only more in plot than say, expecting comments about a six fingered man. The three kidnapper analogies don't super stand out except for the female one. I do give the younger evil brother, points for giving the creepy chills--you can really tell who he's supposed to be channeling in one scene. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.
• "Why the heck didn't my father change the law to be less sexist since he knew I was his only heir?" is a good point....and then we find out a nice reason that maybe he didn't....and then we find out a less nice reason as to why he might not have either. I'll take that below the spoiler cut, sigh. 

On the plus side:

• I do enjoy Amarande being tough, though the scenes where she's forced to cave in to evil for a while are downer-ish.
• Luca is a nice beta male and I do like those. 
• There's a lot of brewing plots going on in this story that don't come to fruition yet that are intriguing. The lost kingdom that Luca is from that he doesn't remember fleeing from as a baby, for instance. Ama reasonably suspects that ah, she knows who the Warlord is, but never gets to follow up on that. I was impressed that the book--or at least Ama--came to the same suspicion as I did there.
• There are several last minute shocking plot twist reveals that I would look forward to reading more about...I am wondering why they got dropped at the last minute, though? Again, below the spoiler cut.

Overall, I give it three and a half stars. I wasn't captivated, but I liked it well enough and it has potential. 

On to the spoiler space....

A Song For A New Day

By Sarah Pinsker.

This is a book that is eerily foreshadowing of our currently shitty times, to the point where you are like, "How did she know???"

The beginning of the book starts with Luce Cannon, a budding musician, running into a bit of trouble with her band as everyone is kicked out of their hotels for bomb threats, a stadium is blown up....which means historically she ends up as the last person who put on a concert before the world was shut down. It's not super spelled out what happened exactly, but seems to be a combination of terrorism and "the pox" breaking out. Anyway, large groups congregating is banned, everyone gets sick, and Luce's performing career as it was is over. Their world sounds like our world now, what with online schooling, being afraid to touch anything because of germs, etc., though I"m not sure how outbreak-ish things are in the future after the whole thing starts. 

Twelve years later we're introduced to our other main character, Rosemary Laws, who's young, naive, and been kept sheltered even from the online world by her parents who moved to a farm. Rosemary has a shitty stalker-y customer service job working for "Superwally," the sort of thing you get directed toward in high school and you shouldn't be able to get any other job for. Except Rosemary does tech support for a company called StageHoloLive one day and they provide her with the means to go see one of their shows, and she is blown away and gets a job with them as a recruiter to go find talent and recruit them to the agency. 
Rosemary's a little baffled as to how she got the job when she's pretty much never been exposed to live music before this, but what the heck, it's a dream job and she even gets to travel! 

I'd like to mention that StageHolo works pretty much exactly like some of the more sophisticated online theater companies I've seen of late, such as Zoom Theatre and SF Shakes, what with having precise timing and marks the performers have to hit in order to sync, etc. That was amazing detail for something that hadn't quite happened yet, but yeah, the author probably did that research. And it is an awesome idea to keep performers performing, since they pretty much can't do it as a job otherwise in this world. Love it. I also liked the Hoodies, which seem to be hoodies hooked up with computers/VR/phones/what have you so you can experience shows like the old days. Though Rosemary's SuperWally Hoodie and the mandatory posters she has to hang on her wall ("You are valued but replaceable") and the call center stalkerishness is accurate and horrifying. 

Anyway, Luce and Rosemary meet when Rosemary is directed towards the secret nightclub Luce is hosting, and Rosemary is totally inspired and finds new acts to recruit and it's all good... until something goes wrong and Rosemary's rose-colored glasses about her cool new gig get smashed and she's left with an ethical dilemma to figure out. To Rosemary's credit, she figures out something to deal with the issue, and by the time she runs into a traveling Luce again, she's got an even better idea....if Luce is willing to get involved. 

I'm not going to spoil what Rosemary finds out, but it's a good reveal--not jaw dropping, but enough to personally hit Rosemary and her new temporary friends, and how Rosemary deals with it is also very good. She's sheltered and naive, but open and endearing and earnest. Luce has a hidden past of being Orthodox Jewish and having to leave her family entirely for not fitting in, but carrying on with life and music as best she can. 

Quibbles:

Speaking as someone living in a pandemic right now, I really wanted more explanation about two things: (a) how the hell have terrorists managed to literally be everywhere and blow up everything to the point where the entire world is shut down twelve years later, and (b) is the pox pandemic still going on at this point? Is ANY of the stuff that shut down the world still going on? Because while Rosemary is at first nervous about being in crowds, touching other humans and hugging, etc. she gets over any fears of being in public pretty quickly and we don't seem to have any issues with actual outbreaks still happening. It seems like everyone is still indoors-ing due to...law? Habit? Any or all of the above? Because it seems like people are still able to have underground gigs without being bombed or getting sick, they just get arrested. Yeah, maybe that wasn't the author's priority, but I wanted to know how realistic it was to still be living in fear in this world at this point.

At this point is everyone being contained just to contain the population? It reminded me a little of reading The Last Days comes to mind and sometimes you want to be all "Hey, could we focus on the world outside of the music a bit more because some crazy is going on here that y'all need to pay attention to." I felt like that was important to clarify and it wasn't.

Also, while the ending is fitting of the characters and situation, it felt a bit anticlimactic to me, mainly because I kind of wonder if it had any effect at all in the long run or just for Luce that night. It ends on an open note, but I wondered anyway.

But overall, good book. I think I'm going to give it three and a half stars because I'm still wondering on that worldbuilding aspect, but it probably deserves four, really? 

Murder By Other Means

By John Scalzi.

Previous book here.

I find it hard to review a book that I had to listen to only--in this case, had to listen to twice to be able to write it--but since nobody else seems to have a review of the book online (I guess for that reason), I'll give it a shot.

It's a couple of years since the last book, and due to budget cuts (and losing the consulting with the cops gig Tony had in the last book), Tony's doing the occasional gray area job, like shooting a businessman who wants to get back to China ASAP. Tony goes for it and then when he goes to deposit some of his pay in the bank, a bank robbery happens. Of course the robbers can escape in this world by shooting each other, but when one of them stays dead--those 1 in 1000 deaths--that throws things off. Even worse, the guy who died turns out to be a dispatcher Tony knows and recently talked to, even if Tony turned down the "choke club" job. He still has some standards.

Anyway, Tony suspects--reasonably--that a bank employee who also got shot during the job was involved in it and kind of snoops around for his old sorta-buddy cop Langdon. He thinks that's the end of it, until Langdon's new nosy partner Bradley kills himself--or well, "kills himself," which kicks off a number of other suicides, or "suicides" because it seems unlikely that all of them would have made that choice. Bradley was investigating Tony since Tony has enough awkward coincidences going on with the case. Langdon thinks Tony needs protection, and she's not wrong, since it seems pretty logical to just about everyone else that Tony could very well be involved since he knows a lot of the people involved.  

This one continues to delve into the implications of this world, which I appreciate, such as "how do you murder someone without technically murdering someone?" (see title) and "how do you threaten someone when death is only sorta on the table?" Even though Tony says he's a dispatcher because he never had any other skills, he's a sharp detective. There is a lot of strong coincidence in this one that makes Tony look guilty, but I did appreciate how all the pieces came together, and even stuff like the opening scenes and Tony's living arrangements turn out to all fit into a puzzle I wasn't expecting. Pretty cool. 

If anything isn't super great in this, it's my kind of realizing that Tony....I dunno, needs some more inner life in some respects, perhaps? Hobbies? Something to him beyond just being a dispatcher/detective? He seems incredibly distant from everyone. He doesn't seem to have family or anything other than books and takeout. He has people he is "friendly" with but isn't friends with, and says this of about everyone. Does he have anyone he'd consider a friend? He doesn't really seem to have connections with anyone or attachments to anything. At one point Tony's apartment is burned down, and having had a friend lose his home in the fires recently so I'm at least a little aware of what shit he's going through, I kind of felt like this just....didn't affect Tony all that much? He's very drifter-y, I'd like to see Tony have some more to him than just the case. I can say that by the end of the book he's actually acknowledging that he's friends with Langdon, so there's that.... 

Zachary Quinto continues to do a great job of narrating and sketching out the various voices in this one. I really like him as a narrator. 

Anyway, I look forward to book three  Four stars. 

A Killing Frost

By Seanan McGuire.

Previous book here. Review goes below the spoiler cut. Four stars. 

A Ransom Christmas

By Rachel Schurig.

Previous book here. 

In the final(?) book in the original Ransome Brothers series, we have a Christmas novella featuring marriages, babies, people screaming in each other's ears for fun, vomiting, escape rooms, and Paige planning a bachelor party. What could go wrong?

It's a fun hangout novella, basically, in which you get to hang out with your old friends and/or watch them want to be sexy with each other, and happily commit into romantic relationships despite being rock stars. It's all very sweet. There's minor conflicts here and there, a bit of life risking at one point, but overall, it's a nice sendoff. What more do you need and what more can I say? Four stars if you love the series. 

 

The Last Emperox

By John Scalzi.

Previous book here. 

For various reasons I've certainly mentioned of late, it took me a long time to finally settle down to reading this. It's very good. Rather sad given the current apocalypse subject matter going on in the book and in the world around me, but it resolved well and I'm happy with that, and I hear it won an award recently? So that's good.

Anyway: situation's the same, all fucked up. Billions are about to die. Various coups are brewing and it seems likely that one way or another Emperox Grayland II doesn't have long to live thanks to all the plots. Her biggest enemy is still out there plotting away--though I do want to say that I am SUPER AMUSED that at one point said enemy is forced to use the alias "Karen." This was written before Karen-ing became A Thing, but amuses me so much. Right now it seems highly unlikely that billions can be saved, especially since there's one livable planet and it's got an army that's going to shoot anyone who comes near it. The emperox's boyfriend is working on the math and he's got a workable idea, which pleases me. But how the hell is Grayland--or anyone--going to stay alive long enough to pull it off?

Well.... Argh, for once I want to write a not super spoilery review, so I guess a lot of fun points I want to make will be below the spoiler cut. But it's a good read, if a bit sad, for reasons. Four and a half stars. I was amazed it all wrapped up in a little over 300 pages, given  the complications. 

Ugh. I wish I could be more articulate today, but nope, I am not. To the spoiler space we go!