All for You by Laura Florand

All for You by Laura Florand

2/5. Het romance of that classic form 'knew each other as kids until he ran off to join the Foreign Legion, never responded to any of her letters, then randomly reappears in her life five years later all like there, I killed people, I'm worthy of getting in your pants now, let's get married.'

There are books that can call out the problematic elements of their own structures and, in so doing, remake or redeem those structures. And there are books that call out the problematic elements in their own structures and leave you sitting there going yep, that's pretty terrible. Sure is. This is the second kind. Yikes. This fucking guy.

This is part of a larger series of romances on the general theme of Paris! Chocolate! Romances with military people! It's generally well-reviewed, so maybe I just randomly picked the wrong book? But seriously, this is set in Paris and there is virtually no sense of place, and the author notes the "research" she did into chocolate making which, uh, I could have gathered the degree of information to provide this level of color from maybe two Wikipedia articles.

Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone

Empress of Forever

3/5. In a near future dystopia America, a queer PoC lady tech entrepreneur attempts to take over the world (to make it better, you know) and finds herself transported to a science fictional universe where a "mysterious"* empress rules all of civilization and erases any culture that gets too advanced and might attract alien predators.

I read this going is this brilliant? Or just weird? Verdict: mostly weird, and like 25% of the way to brilliant. This is stylistically fascinating – it's like the literary version of scifi anime. E.g., when a ship arrives and wants to communicate, a giant face forms on the side and . . . shouts. And when characters need to go sulk somewhere, they just go perch "on an asteroid" (like you do). It's strange and surreal and mostly charming.

And I kept probing it to see what it's really for, and getting not much back. Or not much satisfying. The heart of this book is about community – building it and learning to use it when you are, say, a tech entrepreneur with all the personality disorder that implies. And I can't help reading this entire book as a sort of laboratory of development for the main character, an extended and weird holodeck episode. Which I acknowledge is what most books are. But this one really showed you the constructed aspect of that in a way I found unsatisfying. If anyone has a different reading for what this style is doing, I'd love to hear it.

*Presumably you can spot the plot twist from this single sentence. TBF, I don't think it's intended to be any sort of surprise to the reader.

Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

Embers of War

3/5. A few years after a war between human factions ends with the genocide of an alien species, a sentient ship doing search and rescue stumbles into a conflict that might reignite the war.

Entertaining space opera that does not quite have the technical chops to pull off what it is trying to do – rotating first person POV. The voices needed to be that bit more distinct to make it work, the characters a notch deeper. By far the most interesting to me is the ship, a former military vessel which resigned its commission after the war. The ship's low-simmering conflict about its capacity for violence, while still not really understanding the scope of its own actions, is pitched just right.

The rest of this is interesting enough, and I suspect the trilogy as a whole will be contemplating themes of human violence and the price of peace. Nothing here really lit me on fire, though.