January 2024 Book Reviews
THE LAST DRAGON KING
Leia Stone
Score: B-
A last-minute December 2023 release creeping into 2024, The Last Dragon King is the first book in Leia Stone's new Kings of Avalier YA fantasy series. And while it does leave off on a hook to Stone's next book, it is perfectly sufficient as a standalone. As for whether it's a solid read — that all comes down to what you're looking for.
Our heroine is Arwen, a human with (as far as she knows) the scantest of dragon magic lineage in her blood. She lives her life as a hunter in a small town, long ignored by the kingdom's Dragon King. But now the King is looking for a new wife: one with enough inherent magic to give birth to an heir without dying. Despite her desire to find a boy to call her own, Arwen is not especially interested in becoming queen, and initially believes she's not even in the running. But she soon discovers that her lineage is not at all what she thought. Not only is she a top-tier candidate, but the magic lying dormant inside her could potentially be catastrophic. Now if only she hadn't gone and fallen in love with her royal suitor.
While The Last Dragon King has interesting characters and a unique fantasy setting with potential for interesting expansion, much of its drama rests on the characters' sheer inability to communicate. Also, while it's refreshing to see a female protagonist who doesn't have to choose between married life and military badassery, it's a little disconcerting how quickly any other interesting female character falls under one blade or another along her road to achieving that.
While the story itself has interesting threads and the prose is solid, The Last Dragon King is a very by-the-numbers YA fantasy. The promise of an overarching story of kings of many types and the upstart heroines who love them, combined with an interesting setting, is enough to make this an interesting casual read.
SECONDHAND SPACEMAN
Rachel Aukes
Score: B
Initially slated for release at year's beginning, Secondhand Spaceman has been pushed forward to next month. But since it's been read for this blog post, we're going for it. Just bear in mind that this will be available next month, with a book to follow every month after.
Our protagonist is Frank Woods, a run-of-the-mill college kid whose biggest aspiration is to become a truck driver. But that all goes away when he's abducted by an alien and press-ganged into a gig as an intergalactic repo man. Or, to be more precise, his deadbeat dad willed the job to him. With a lifetime of debt to pay off and an inherited ship (and its deadpan sarcastic AI) to get him there, Frank will have to navigate alien encounters, red tape, system failures, and GOD themselves to get his job done.
Secondhand Spaceman has a relatively fun premise and wastes no time getting down to business, but the story itself appears to fluctuate between what it does best and what it wants to do. At its peaks, Frank is coming to terms simultaneously with the trauma of his youth and the terror of his new situation, discovering more about himself and with the potential to become a really capable, really unlikely hero. In its troughs, it leans into the sort of Guardians of the Galaxy quippy referential humor that's hit-or-miss even at the best of times. The books are engaging, intriguing, and even legitimately funny when the one-liners are relaxed and Frank is allowed to interact with his new reality in an honest way. Should future books embrace that, this series has some genuine promise.
SHORES OF A NEW HORIZON: A TERRAFORMING MARS NOVEL
M Darusha Wehm
Score: A
In the Terraforming Mars board game, players take on the roles of corporations using their respective resources to... well... terraform Mars. In Aconyte's spinoff series, now three books strong, we get closer to the people on the ground: the workers, scientists, researchers, and everyday people caught in the crossfire. In Shores of a New Horizon, one of those people is Zammi Kaspar: a researcher whose life was torn apart as a child, and who reunites with his missing sister in unusual circumstances.
As a contaminated ice asteroid threatens to imperil the Red Planet's water supply, new and unpleasant facts come to light. And some of those facts implicate the siblings' surviving parent and his company. With the stench of potential corporate corruption in the air, old familial wounds reopened, and the locals' livelihoods at stake, the tenuously-reunited family must go outside the norm (and the law) to ensure the safety of Mars.
Shores of a New Horizon may appears to be veering toward a by-the-numbers corporate intrigue piece, but the true resolution of the story is so much more satisfying. At its heart, it's a story about family and trust, twisted together with tiny details that make this near-future world feel as real and lived-in as a small town. And, as with all the best tie-in books, it can stand on its own without any knowledge of the source material.
TOM CLANCY'S THE DIVISION: HUNTED
Thomas Parrott
Score: A-
The Operation: Crossroads saga, which began in Tom Clancy's The Division: Compromised, continues. Maira Kanhai has survived, and it would seem that she has new allies. As she recovers and gets back on her feet, she helps her rescuers with a high-end programming project while receiving excellent care and physical therapy. And, perhaps, something more.
But not everything is as it seems. Maira is missing time, things seem a little too good, and she has the creeping sensation that her new friends aren't telling her everything. Meanwhile, her Division allies (including Brenda Wells) receive shocking intel: Maira has gone rogue. Assembling a specialized cell, Brenda goes out to find Maira and discover why she's working against her own team.
Full disclosure, I read and enjoyed The Division: Compromised. So I came in with some foreknowledge of Thomas Parrott's story and characters. But even if you don't have that foreknowledge yourself, Hunted gives plenty of footholds to enter into this universe. Nor do you need to be a Clancy fan to dig into this story. There's admittedly a lot going on here — Maira's half of the story, ironically, flows more cohesively than Brenda's — but the result is a satisfying blend of action, drama, and psychological thrilller.
THE LAST IMMORTAL: A NOVEL
Natalie Gibson
Score: C
Young Ramillia wakes up in an asylum with no memory of brutally murdering her parents with her bare hands. Of course there are a lot of things she doesn't remember about her childhood. But when Sir Julian takes her under his wing as benefactor and fiancé, a whole new world opens up to her: one of power, deceit, and (most of all) the promise of eternal life.
Ramillia is a "Carrier": a rare genetic mutation of humans gifted with strength and immortality, rarer still for being female. Despite being inducted into this powerful species's society, however, she is still left largely in the dark about what they are and how they operate. As she learns more about her nature, from the relationship between Carriers and Incola to her own affinity for violence to the other version of herself living in her mind, she begins to see the broader world for what it is. And, in the book's final act, she sets about destroying what she finds.
The Last Immortal is a difficult read for many reasons. Thematically, it is thick with abuse (both physical and sexual), treats pretty much nothing as off-limits, and fades to black less and less as the story goes on. While initially this does serve the theme, the third act of the book seems to fall apart, and not in a way that feels at all tied to Ramillia's own character journey. There's a marked difference between the character rushing things and the writer rushing things. And while the first part felt slow and the second felt perfectly paced, the third felt as though it was written to a deadline... and not a diegetic, character-driven deadline. Burning questions are either left unanswered or addressed in haste — not in the way that the rest of the book explored gaslighting and disinformation, nor even in a way that leans into Ramillia's own collapsing psyche, but in an extra-textual way that feels almost as though an indelible upper word count is being approached. From metaphors for feminine power in a masculine world to a psychic octopus and scrambled brains, it feels like a rug-pull. Should you choose to read it, I recommend leaving off at the end of part 2.
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