Tag Archives: new adult

once and future

Book Review: Once & Future duology, by Amy Rose Capetta & Cori McCarthy

I’ve had Sword in the Stars (by Amy Rose Capetta & Cori McCarthy*) on my bookshelf for a while. I think someone put it in the little free library. I borrowed Once & Future from the public library so that I could read the duology together.

*Side note, I’ve seen the authors’ names spelled differently. So, I’ve done the best I can here by going by what is on these covers.

once and future covers

Once and Future King as a teenage girl — and she has a universe to save.
I’ve been chased my whole life. As a fugitive refugee in the territory controlled by the tyrannical Mercer corporation, I’ve always had to hide who I am. Until I found Excalibur.

Now I’m done hiding.

My name is Ari Helix. I have a magic sword, a cranky wizard, and a revolution to start.

When Ari crash-lands on Old Earth and pulls a magic sword from its ancient resting place, she is revealed to be the newest reincarnation of King Arthur. Then she meets Merlin, who has aged backward over the centuries into a teenager, and together they must break the curse that keeps Arthur coming back. Their quest? Defeat the cruel, oppressive government and bring peace and equality to all humankind.

No pressure.

Reviews:

Once & Future:
My experience with this book was very up and down. I loved the racially diverse, queer/gender queer, gender-bent retelling of ‘King’ Arthur and their knights in space aspect of the book, and I found the banter really funny. But…and I hope I can say this in a way that doesn’t come off horribly. The humour aspect got stale after a while, and the constant reminder of the queering of the story became overly heavy-handed.

Never is there a knight who happens to be bi, or non-binary, etc., even after we’ve been told. ALWAYS it is a cisgender or gay who happens to be a knight, if that makes sense. After a while, it felt self-congratulatory on the part of the authors; see how with-it we are?! We left no one out. Which is great on one hand, but it just…well, it left very little room for the characters to be anything else.

Here’s the pretty gay one. Here’s the strapping cisgendered, heterosexual one. Here’s the hip non-binary, disabled one. Here is the asexual one. Here are the lesbians and the neurodivergent one. Look at all the different family structures they came from, lesbian moms, happy heterosexuals, adoptions, abandonments, they’re all represented! After a while, even their names muddle, but never their identity or form of self-expression. I wanted so much more for all of them than to be an identity placeholder.

So, I loved the book in the beginning, flagged through the middle, such that I wasn’t sure I’d continue to the second (even as it sat on my coffee table), and then came back around to enjoying the ending. I will read the second one, I think, but I’m not going into it with anywhere near as high hopes as I did the first.

Sword in the Stars:
I enjoyed this second book more than the first because the twistiness of time added an interesting dimension that the first lacked. I do, kind of, feel the story would have held together a little better if the characters had been in their 20s, rather than teens. But all in all, it wrapped up nicely, and I appreciated the meta-ness of the last few chapters, as well as what I have decided is a little bit of an easter egg relating to the state of America in 2020 when the book was published.

once and future photo


Other Reviews:

Steph’s Story Space: Once & Future

 

 

Book Review – Wolfish: Moonborne, by G.K. DeRosa

I believe I purchased a copy of G.K. DeRosa‘s Wolfish: Moonborne during a Facebook author signing event. wolfish cover

FATE HAS A WICKED SENSE OF HUMOR

When I was sixteen, I met the love of my life in magic school. He’d appear exactly once a year at the annual masquerade ball, then vanish…

Fast forward to the present: to the night I’m attacked and my hidden wolf emerges. As it turns out, I’m a freakin’ hairy, tail-wagging, shape-shifting werewolf so instead of returning to the human world after graduating, I’m dragged to Moon Valley to control my inner beast. Only problem is, I’m not just a wolf.

And someone wants me dead because of it.

When I meet the alpha heir, sparks fly, And bombshell– he’s my supposedly wolfy fated mate, but he’s nothing like the boy I loved. He’s cold, sullen, a total jerk but impossibly gorgeous. Of course. And he’s got secrets too. Despite hating him most days, I can’t deny the irresistible attraction… and neither can he. Even after he rejects me.

Little does he known, I’m more than capable of taking care of myself– maybe even capable of taking his claim as alpha.

my review

This is labeled YA/NA, but the character won’t even curse: “Chill the eff out,” for example. So, I’ll let you figure out where it falls between YA and NA. No, I won’t. It’s YA. Now you know.

It’s an OK story. I liked Sierra well enough. She’s a strong protagonist outside of being a mate-bound doormat when it comes to Hunter. But that’s the problem. You see almost no pleasant interludes between them, but she is still slavishly dedicated to him. In the end, I couldn’t root for the romance and didn’t even particularly like him. The side characters are fairly stock, but the world is interesting.

If I had the next one in the series, I would probably read it. But I don’t think I’ll bother buying it.

wolfish photo


Other Reviews:

Wolfish Series by G.K. DeRosa

 

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Book Review: Valor, by Casey L. Bond

I believe I won this copy Casey L. Bond‘s Valor somewhere in the wilds of the internet.

valor cover

Dragon. Warrior. Woman.

To honor her brother’s dying plea, Vayl Halifex carries a message that might prevent war with the location of their captive princess. Fortune and circumstance align in her favor and Vayl’s life is forever changed when an opportunity arises that only she can seize. With the help of a matchmaker, she becomes the emperor’s newest concubine. The new role affords her unfettered access to the gilded mountain stronghold, where the princess is rumored to be hidden away.

But she won’t take this risk alone. Her brother’s best friend, dragon warrior Estin, calls on the small army of elven assassins he leads to use their magic and might to flank her for the fight to come. The band of dragons takes Vayl into their fold and trains her as best they can before she’s whisked away to the palace.

Unbeknownst to the warriors, a dreadful magic simmers in the gilded fortress. With those fiercely protective of the emperor closing in, and the dragon assassins disappearing one by one, Vayl’s chance at escape narrows to a sliver, along with her hope of finding the princess or fighting her way out of the palace. With her heart entwined with that of the dragon warrior she was never supposed to love, she begins to fear the price of her treachery will be her life… or his.

my review

OK, first things first, I was disappointed to discover there were no actual dragons, just a group that calls themselves the Dragons. Not a deal breaker, but it still made me sad. After that initial disappointment, I thought that this was a fine (if unexceptional story). It is, in fact, a fine version of what it is. But that’s also the problem. It’s a fine version of a story that there are 47 gagillion versions of. There’s nothing particularly new. So, if you know you like new-adult (bordering on YA) stories of young women triumphing over adversity to save the day and falling in love on the side, you will likely like this one as much as any other.

Having said all of that, I find myself lately becoming more aware of and on guard against sneakily fundamentalist stories, and I have to wonder if this isn’t one of them. Sure, Vayl has a backbone and fights for what she believes in. But when it comes down to it, she takes all the power offered her and gives it to a man she barely knows so that she can go home and be a wife and, one presumes, mother (given the conversation she has with Estin toward the end).

Sure, she offers up a help-meet to that man…in the form of a mute woman. A woman, I might add, whom Vayl does actually know and trust, who would have made a good leader. Plus, the only other young woman of power left to her own devices goes rogue and evil over a man. I would argue this serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when women are allowed too much freedom and power. They can’t be trusted with it. Then, add the fact that with the exception the Fae queen, literally every other woman in the book is related to serving male sexual desires in some fashion (a matchmaker pimping out concubines, her assistants, concubines, a maid that is hinted to have been a past concubine, a fae assassin in a new and exciting sexual relationship with another fae assassin, etc.) When I really start thinking about it, it’s not even subtle.

valor photoNone of this is helped by the author thanking God, first and foremost, in her acknowledgements. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, obviously. But it does stand as a datapoint when one is looking at a (fantasy) story that so matches the fundamentalist agenda of seeing women as best serving in the home and as subordinate (silent) partners to men in positions of authority. I’m just saying.


Other Reviews:

Featured Review: Valor (Casey L. Bond)