Looking For a Good Book

The universe is full of aliens and the tiny planet we call Earth has only one export of any value … chocolate. And when chocolate is a hot commodity galaxy-wide, someone who knows how to work with it will be in demand.

Bo Benitez is a culinary arts student but she becomes a criminal when she steals some cacao plants from a well-fortified plantation.  There are some in the galaxy who think that chocolate should be made available to anyone who wants it and not controlled only a few. Bo agrees, but now is being hunted for her theft of the valuable chocolate plants.

Along with her boyfriend (from another world) and a alien, reptilian cop, Bo escapes on an unmarked starship.  This should be good … except the starship is owned by an alien race that eats their stowaways! It doesn’t seem like things could get much worse for Bo and friends when Bo learns a secret about a threat against the earth.

The premise here is really fantastic.  Having a galaxy-wide export that really is something that is likely unique to our earth makes a tremendous amount of sense.  And having our protagonist as someone who is learning to work with that commodity also makes sense.

But the execution of this great idea is just a bit clumsy.

Bo Benitez is mostly a good protagonist here. That she is a Latina is also a really nice idea – I can’t think of too many Latinos/Latinas that are leading characters in modern sci-fi/fantasy. But this book tries to do a little too much.

We’re introduced to a world in which there are vast numbers of aliens, but life on Earth doesn’t seem too different from what we experience today. It’s only when Bo gets off planet that we get a sense of how different this world and this time is. This is rather a big and abrupt change – the world-building here just isn’t smooth.

Aliens who eat their stowaways.  Okay.  Is this a completely foreign concept to Bo and the cop?  Or was this something they knew might be a possibility?  Either way, we don’t really get the right reactions and the behaviors of our protagonists just don’t really add up.  And frankly, I’d like to have seen more actual work with the chocolate … they way we were set up in the early chapters.  Perhaps, though, we will see more of that in later books.

I’ve looked through the other responses to this book on Goodreads.  Many people are really put off by the author’s use of a mix of English and Spanish. While it did bother me to some degree – mostly because I don’t speak any Spanish – I thought that a book, set in the future, with a Latina protagonist, absolutely should have a mix of Spanish and English!  Our language changes all the time and it seems perfectly natural that we’ll evolve into a blend of Spanglish sometime.  Still…it doesn’t make for any easier reading.

There’s a great idea here, with an interesting leading character.  We just need a little tighter writing and editing.

Looking for a good book? Free Chocolate by Amber Royer has promise and potential with many good things going for it, but it falls just a little short of being a recommended read.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Free Chocolate

author: Amber Royer

series: Chocoverse #1

publisher: Angry Robot

ISBN: 0857667505

paperback, 448 pages

In a book store full of fantasies in which a lovable rogue, who’s an unwilling hero, battles against a powerful wizard/mage/god, Cameron Johnston’s The Traitor God comes out just slightly above average.

Edrin Walker has spent the last decade on the run.  He’s been avoiding debt as well as some of the people he’s pissed off. He’s a powerful magician and not afraid to mix it up when necessary, but he’d just as soon stay under the radar if possible. He also knows that by staying away from his home of Setharis his friends Lynas and Charra and their daughter Layla should be out of the danger that he, Edrin, constantly brings.  But one night Edrin dreams of his friend Lynas being stalked by daemons and then being brutally tortured by a mysterious man. Edrin has long had a magical connection with Lynas and he knows that the dream might actually be something Lynas has suffered through.

Edrin heads back to an un-welcoming Setharis in order to do everything he can to protect Charra and Layla. Then he wants to know what Lynas was doing to attract the attention of magicians and gods to receive the torture that he went through.  Finding that answer leads Edrin on an epic adventure and anyone standing in his way – gods included – will have to deal with his wrath.

Overall, I enjoyed this book.  But I found it uneven.  The opening pages, establishing Edrin’s character, were fun and lively and I really knew that I would enjoy the book given the protagonist’s manner.  But I actually felt that once Edrin got to Setharis the book slowed down significantly.  It picks up again, slowly, but builds and builds.  Too much, in fact.

I understand the dramatic impact of having a protagonist/hero overcome unbelievable odds.  To take a beating and keep on going is practically the definition of heroic.  But there’s a fine line between setting up a heroic measure and going too far and becoming laughable.  For me, Johnston nudges the outside of that line.  At one point I actually said, “Oh good grief. Really?” out loud as Edrin took an unbelievable beating after beating after beating.

It was a small moment, but it was the climax, and it let me down rather than built up, because it went too far.

There’s enough good work in this story, and Johnston clearly sets us up for more epic adventure to come, that I look forward to the next adventure.  But I hope it will have a better balance.

Looking for a good book? The Traitor God by Cameron Johnston is good, but uneven, epic fantasy.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Traitor God

author: Cameron Johnston

series: Age of Tyranny #1

publisher: Angry Robot

ISBN: 0857667793

paperback, 432 pages

Every once in awhile I come across a book that I feel is well written and with an interesting set of characters in an interesting story, and yet it doesn’t click with me.  This is one of those books.

Given the number of books I read in a year, and with many of them being by authors who are new to me, I shouldn’t be surprised that I run into this, and yet each time it happens, it surprises me none-the-less.

A team of explorers are on an intelligent space ship, Alchemon. They are sent to investigate some unusual signals from a distant area, but everything possible seems to go wrong and soon they begin to distrust one-another … a dangerous thing to do when you need to rely on everyone for day-to-day survival. In time, they realize that this fight for survival is also a fight to save the human race.

Mostly I just found this book rather dull.  The suspense didn’t built up enough for me. Only one moment stands out in which I wondered how one person was going to react and if another would manage to survive the encounter. Otherwise I thought the book was so evenly paced that you could pick up reading the book at any page and it would feel the same from that point on.

The characters never grabbed my attention and so when they started to fear one another I never knew who I was supposed to root for and who I was supposed to worry about.

The “something is out there” story also never caught on for me. I’ve read this sort of space opera fairly recently, and done quite well (The Expanse series comes first to mind) so this turned out to be quite a disappointment. There are differences, of course, but it just wasn’t enough to excite me into reading more.

Looking for a good book? Starship Alchemon by Christopher Hinz is a space opera story that hits all the right marks for clever characters and story, but does so in such a methodical and evenly paced way that the book is really quite dull.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgally, in exchange for an honest review.

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Starship Alchemon

author: Christopher Hinz

publisher: Angry Robot

ISBN: 085766817X

paperback, 376 pages