Reading Wednesday
What I finished:
How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse and How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge by K. Eason.. Fun, snappy space opera with a fairy tale twist. Rory Thorne is a princess of a far future planetary empire, and also a descendant of the princess who was Sleeping Beauty. Like Sleeping Beauty, she gets a bunch of fairy gifts and one curse at her naming ceremony as a baby. These play into her ability to deal with an unwanted arranged marriage, a sinister conspiracy against her fiancé, and a threat of alien invasion. The characters are engaging, and there's a fair amount of humor and tons of loyalty kink between Rory and her royal entourage/pirate crew. (Yes, she's a space fairy tale princess who becomes a space pirate! Sorry, privateer). If you like this kind of thing (which I do), then this is the kind of thing you'll like.
The Sweetest Remedy by Jane Igharo. About Hannah, a young biracial woman from San Francisco who travels to Lagos to attend the funeral of her father, whom she only met once as a child (he had a brief affair with her mother and didn't stick around). There's some minor drama with Hannah's Nigerian family, who had no idea she existed until she shows up, and a low-key romance with a nice young man who's connected to the family, but I think the main focus of the story was to give readers a picture of Nigerian life that goes beyond the usual Western stereotypes about African countries. Hannah's father, we discover, was incredibly rich, and everyone in the family is hip and glamorous and sophisticated. There's not much by way of stakes to the story; every now and then somebody says something mean to Hannah and upsets her, but then somebody else takes her shopping for fancy clothes or to dine at a fancy restaurant or whisks her off for a romantic getaway at a fancy resort, and everything's fine again. It's total wish-fulfillment fantasy (starting with the fact that Hannah is a twenty-something who makes a living writing articles for an on-line women's magazine and somehow earns enough to live alone in a nice part of San Francisco), which I enjoyed, but it's not the kind of book that's going to stick with me in the long term, I think. And I do wish the romance was more developed. I didn't get a sense that Hannah had any real connection to Lawrence beyond "we're both young and hot and nice, and also he's the only male character in the book who's my age and not related to me."
What I'm reading now:
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko: a collection of linked ghost stories with a feminist bent.
Nancy Wake: World War Two's Most Rebellious Spy by Russel Braddon.. All those Kate Quinn books about women being heroic in WWII made me want to pick up some non-fiction about the topic, so this.
What I'm reading next: I'll find out when I get there. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/671281.html. You may comment there using OpenID.
How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse and How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge by K. Eason.. Fun, snappy space opera with a fairy tale twist. Rory Thorne is a princess of a far future planetary empire, and also a descendant of the princess who was Sleeping Beauty. Like Sleeping Beauty, she gets a bunch of fairy gifts and one curse at her naming ceremony as a baby. These play into her ability to deal with an unwanted arranged marriage, a sinister conspiracy against her fiancé, and a threat of alien invasion. The characters are engaging, and there's a fair amount of humor and tons of loyalty kink between Rory and her royal entourage/pirate crew. (Yes, she's a space fairy tale princess who becomes a space pirate! Sorry, privateer). If you like this kind of thing (which I do), then this is the kind of thing you'll like.
The Sweetest Remedy by Jane Igharo. About Hannah, a young biracial woman from San Francisco who travels to Lagos to attend the funeral of her father, whom she only met once as a child (he had a brief affair with her mother and didn't stick around). There's some minor drama with Hannah's Nigerian family, who had no idea she existed until she shows up, and a low-key romance with a nice young man who's connected to the family, but I think the main focus of the story was to give readers a picture of Nigerian life that goes beyond the usual Western stereotypes about African countries. Hannah's father, we discover, was incredibly rich, and everyone in the family is hip and glamorous and sophisticated. There's not much by way of stakes to the story; every now and then somebody says something mean to Hannah and upsets her, but then somebody else takes her shopping for fancy clothes or to dine at a fancy restaurant or whisks her off for a romantic getaway at a fancy resort, and everything's fine again. It's total wish-fulfillment fantasy (starting with the fact that Hannah is a twenty-something who makes a living writing articles for an on-line women's magazine and somehow earns enough to live alone in a nice part of San Francisco), which I enjoyed, but it's not the kind of book that's going to stick with me in the long term, I think. And I do wish the romance was more developed. I didn't get a sense that Hannah had any real connection to Lawrence beyond "we're both young and hot and nice, and also he's the only male character in the book who's my age and not related to me."
What I'm reading now:
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko: a collection of linked ghost stories with a feminist bent.
Nancy Wake: World War Two's Most Rebellious Spy by Russel Braddon.. All those Kate Quinn books about women being heroic in WWII made me want to pick up some non-fiction about the topic, so this.
What I'm reading next: I'll find out when I get there. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/671281.html. You may comment there using OpenID.