Caught Running by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban

Caught Running by Abigail Roux

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


M/M. This didn't work for me, but it was apparently good for the embryos.*

*A friend and I have an agreement to read M/M romance during IVF hell rather than do any of the other internet-recommended activities (praying, using cutesy sayings like "babydust," weeping). So I read this for her, and so far, it was apparently successful. So there's that!

Aaaanyway. This is otherwise bland M/M about the high school baseball coach and the science teacher hooking up. This has many of the faults of the genre, most notably bizarre and dizzying POV shifts so we can experience things from both sides, and trust me, they weren't that interesting the first time around. Also, the only role for women in this book is to throw themselves in exaggerated and creepy fashion at the dudes. What is that? I see it all the time in M/M, but can't put my finger on what it is supposed to be doing.

Anyway, there's a nice lack of stupid external impediments (oh noes, we can't be together because your twin brother's ex fiancé's cousin kidnapped my niece and blackmailed us!) but when you strip out all that nonsense, you do actually have to replace it with internal conflict. And, well . . . nope.

Good for the embryos, though.




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The Fractal Prince by Hanu Rajaniemi

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


More post singularity thief nonsense in a wildly inventive future solar system.

Look, the thing is. I like a story that skips infodumps as much as the next girl. The prequel had that great setup where you could actually steal time off of someone's life, and this book does the same trick of plopping you down into a culture and never actually explaining the rules so it takes a few hundred pages to figure shit out. He makes it worthwhile, because these settings really are great. But at a certain point, it is incumbent upon an author to ensure that his readers . . . this is awkward . . . can actually figure out what the fuck happened. Because I am a sophisticated and experienced reader, I read this book over a short period of time, I rewound to check certain sections again . . . and I'm still not sure.

It's supposed to be all *gestures* there's this puzzle box, and getting into it destroys parts of what's inside. And the book is supposed to be like that. Parts of it are supposed to be impenetrable (unlike your typical caper, which turns on the eventual flourishing reveal). And that's fine. But I finished it feeling that, for all its vivid textures and beautiful set pieces, this book simply failed to execute on its end of the reader-writer contract. I am assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the key to the puzzle box is in the third book, but I'm frankly not convinced at this point that I want to bother.




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