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Questland by Carrie Vaughn
Apr. 27th, 2022 10:07 amQuestland
3/5. Literature professor with a traumatic history is recruited by a billionaire to accompany a team of mercenaries onto his fantasy theme park island to reclaim it from rebelling engineers, including her ex.
This book had to overcome my initial dislike for its sketchy first few chapters, where character is done through fill-in-the-blank trauma and geeky references. But it did overcome that, and once the story got going, it started complicating our heroine and specifically her relationship with fandom in ways that I enjoyed. This book is, like, 60% geek dog whistle by volume, which is both annoyingly too much and appropriate. The density of it helps with the copyright problem – Vaughn can't actually lean on Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, et al., so she wisely makes it so the island can't either for the same reasons. So, the sediment of references is to the underlayer of these properties, to the tropes they invented or run on. That makes it more interesting when our main character is both taken in by the island and its science/magic (robot unicorns that are truly beautiful! Dragons!) and also constantly looking behind the magic as part of her exercise of fannishness. She's the one who asks "but who's doing the dishes?" in the middle of an elvish feast, which endears her to me.
For all that, this book never quite got as deep or interesting as I wanted it to. It couldn't – it's short, as modern novels go, and there just wasn't a lot of room left after all the references. I'd have shifted the balance on that, personally.
Content notes: Reference to school shooting in the past.
3/5. Literature professor with a traumatic history is recruited by a billionaire to accompany a team of mercenaries onto his fantasy theme park island to reclaim it from rebelling engineers, including her ex.
This book had to overcome my initial dislike for its sketchy first few chapters, where character is done through fill-in-the-blank trauma and geeky references. But it did overcome that, and once the story got going, it started complicating our heroine and specifically her relationship with fandom in ways that I enjoyed. This book is, like, 60% geek dog whistle by volume, which is both annoyingly too much and appropriate. The density of it helps with the copyright problem – Vaughn can't actually lean on Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, et al., so she wisely makes it so the island can't either for the same reasons. So, the sediment of references is to the underlayer of these properties, to the tropes they invented or run on. That makes it more interesting when our main character is both taken in by the island and its science/magic (robot unicorns that are truly beautiful! Dragons!) and also constantly looking behind the magic as part of her exercise of fannishness. She's the one who asks "but who's doing the dishes?" in the middle of an elvish feast, which endears her to me.
For all that, this book never quite got as deep or interesting as I wanted it to. It couldn't – it's short, as modern novels go, and there just wasn't a lot of room left after all the references. I'd have shifted the balance on that, personally.
Content notes: Reference to school shooting in the past.
