Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston

Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So much fun. So, so much. I've been waiting for this book for months, and when I finally got it, I waited for a day on which I could read with no interruptions, and devoured the entire thing in one sitting.

It's comfort reading, that's for sure. Perhaps it sounds weird to categorise as "comfort" a book in which characters are disembowelled in a particularly gruesome fashion, siblings are constantly beating up on each other, there is ultra-violent sports and lots of screaming - oh my god the screaming! - but there it is. What can I say? I hate crassness in general, but in the case of this particular series, the way it's written just - works. Humour, sarcasm, violence, making one's own family, women kicking butt - this series has it all (in spades).

I've been wanting to read more about Mads and the basketball team for a while now - they were suitably nutso in the earlier Honey Badger instalments. Mads also has the worst family ever - which we knew from the first Honey Badger book. But what I love about this series - and the connected ones like Pride - is that the story is never simply about one couple. These are ensemble casts for a reason - the main characters have to have their families (blood or otherwise - and some blood families can be nightmares at best) to riff off. So it definitely helps to have read the preceding books.

The MacKilligan sisters march to the beat of their own drum, and unfortunately for the Malone brothers, that drum's come to their door. The Malones can be complete twits - certainly, the utter absurdity of how they burned the bridges with the very women who could help them and then tried clumsily to fix the situation is a case in point.

And, with that slow spreading smile, she said, “One day . . . your baby sister is going to come to me and ask me a question about men and dating”—she leaned away from her friends and toward the brothers—“and I’m going to tell her every. f***ing. thing.”

Which brings me to the snark. And the action. As I've said in other reviews, I'm an action junkie. Well-written action jumps off the page and into my head as though I were watching a movie. These might not be the battles she writes as GA Aiken, but Laurenston has a deft hand with action sequences and they are by turns gory, bloody, violent and thrilling.

To apex predators, badgers were nothing more than an add-on to their value meal. To honey badgers, however . . . their kind were apex predators—and damn proud of it.

The series has moved far beyond the romance and almost-every-chapter sex of the earlier instalments, and honestly, it works. One sex scene - and a pretty hot one at that - shows up somewhere in the final third of the book, and what I liked about it is that it wasn't part of some long, flirty, slow-burn romance. Mads and Finn are not those kinds of people. In fact, it took their family and friends (even the arrogant lunkhead Keane) to point out to them that they even liked each other. No soulful stares or hitching breath or romantic encounters. Their first date was all about the food, and even while they were packing it away, that scene came with huge but quiet emotion as we met more people who were more important in Mads' life than her actual blood family.

The rest of the book was taken up by intrigue, action, inter-clan shifter politics, and basketball team madness. The running joke about the house that Mads buys and that Nelle decorates in 24 hours with, well, EVERYTHING that Mads likes is freaking hilarious. Especially the condoms.

That was when they all bolted, trying to make it to freedom.
But Mads just wasn’t fast enough. Max grabbed the back of her T-shirt and held her.
Mads held her arms out toward her teammates. Tock began to come back toward her but Streep caught her arm and yanked her toward the front of the house.
“Forget her! Just run!”
Treacherous bitches!

Looking forward to the next few in the series - there were certainly sparks between the remaining Malone brothers and a couple of the basketball team members. I want to read more about Tonks and Streep, for one, especially after the utterly hysterical scene in the plane in which everyone refused to use the words "friends" or "love", just to get up Streep's nose. I want to read more about Shay the dog-loving tiger who is mocked for treating his pets so well because he's a predator. I'd like to smack young Nat upside the head and I hope the MacKilligan sisters manage to overcome the years of being babied and spoiled because she's going to need it. There will certainly need to be a few more to tease out the mystery the Malone brothers have been seeking - of who killed their father.

And with Kyle reappearing in the same book as Nat, and keeping in mind that several of the other young shifters are likely to be coming of age in books to come, there's certainly fodder for many more years of hilarity. One can but hope.

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Watchers by Dean Koontz

Watchers by Dean Koontz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dean Koontz was one of my favourite writers for a couple of decades, and Watchers was one of my favourite books - hence the old 5-star rating. Heck, I've had several print copies of this book (including a replacement for the copy my dog ate), so that I could share the magic with friends.

It's almost 20 years later, and upon a re-read, the problematic aspects of the book are far more obvious, the storyline isn't as engaging, the characters are rather flat (Nora's a bit of a bore, though the utterly obnoxious handyman sounded a little too realistic for my liking, based on social media interactions), the situations are seriously dated (they made sense almost 20 years ago, but need some serious updating).

But then, who cares about the human characters when there's Einstein and The Outsider? Einstein! World's smartest dog! The book does do a decent job of showing exactly why The Outsider hates itself - and Einstein - so much. There's no subtlety in the depictions of how "normies" view "others", although amped up to a degree that makes The Outsider more than just different and actually malevolent - albeit sympathetic in the final climactic scene.

So, for Einstein and The Outsider, the five stars remain, even though the book is just no longer my cup of tea; my tastes have changed and that's okay. This book was great for what it was, when it was written; viewed through today's lens, it's nowhere close to as impactful, but I won't throw away my well-read copy because it still speaks to some of the best times of my life.

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Alien Hunters by Daniel Arenson

Alien Hunters by Daniel Arenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oh Captain, my captain

What a riot this book turned out to be. Much more fun than I expected. And yes, very much a nod to various fandoms, particularly Firefly - there are plenty of easter eggs to satisfy the most ardent fan, without letting the nods take over the story.

Quirky, weird crew, reminiscent of Firefly and the Wayfarer? Check. The Dragon Huntress is certainly a home, like Serenity, with nods to the best ship in the 'verse in her design. And let's not forget the sky references to LotR, Princess Bride, Star Trek, and others.

Riff can be a bit annoying, but thankfully the story isn't always told from his point of view. Yes, it's more a novella than a novel, but entertaining despite its length.

Is it going to win awards? No. Is it going to choke you up, make you worry about the crew, entertain you with quips and space battles and David vs Goliath scenes, make you chuckle and grin? Indeed.

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Review: Fortune's Pawn

Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is the type that's right up my alley. It's full of action, includes psychic abilities, has creatures, thrills and mysteries... and battles. Space battles, in this case. It's a formula I tend to love.

I love kick-ass heroines. I adore bad-asses. Not to mention warriors and freaking fantastic armour (the Lady Grey was a character herself, in my head).

My suit was the color of morning mist, a light, silvery gray chased through with a spiraling pattern that was only visible in direct light. It was a speed suit, built for strength and flexibility, but the money I’d spent really showed in the suit’s size. Usually, size is a good indicator of the strength potential for a suit of powered armor, but not always.
...
Even I’d been a little skeptical when the Master Armorsmith first showed me her power ratings, but my worries had died the first time I’d put the Lady on. Over the two and a half years we’d been together, my suit had jumped me hundreds of feet onto escaping thruster ships and punched armored combat marines through bulkheads without pushing into the red.
She might look like a light racing suit, but my Lady was ruthless to those who underestimated her, or me, and I’ve never regretted a cent of the fortune I’d paid for her.

I read about the Lady Grey and I think of a combination of these:

Aside from the Lady Grey, Devi loves her weapons so much that she names them. Mia the plasma shotgun, Sasha the armour-piercing pistol, Phoebe and Elsie the thermite blades. I can get behind that.

I have a habit of recording and rewatching just the action scenes from movies and TV series because I love them so much. When it comes to the action scenes in this book, Rachel Bach delivers in spades. She says Devi was partially inspired by Ellen Ripley from Aliens and Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender, among others, while the armour and the Paradoxians were influenced by Warhammer 40K. The action scenes certainly reminded me of a mix of Aliens, Edge of Tomorrow, Alita: Battle Angel, Mad Max: Fury Road and even some Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Very few authors can actually craft action scenes that literally make me feel like I'm watching a movie. Right from the very first one.

I was in the air before he finished. The Lady Gray couldn’t fly, but she could jump so high and fast it didn’t matter. I shot up until I was eye level with the cargo bay lights and then dropped, flipping in midair to land hard with both feet on Cotter’s broad shoulders. I’d angled to land right on the weight balancer that kept his tank of a suit upright, and my impact sent him tilting with a strangled gasp. It only knocked him for a moment, but a moment was all I needed.

I reached down and popped the hidden safety that’s always in the same place on assembly-line suits, yanking up his face shield with one hand while my other dove to grab his now-bared throat. It was a move that would never have worked on small armor like mine, but then people who wore reasonably sized suits rarely needed this sort of discipline. The moment I touched him, Cotter froze. Snapping his neck would be nothing to my armor-powered hand, and he knew it.



It took me a while to warm up to Devi Morris; she tries hard to be a stone-cold bitch but sometimes she's just an arrogant asshole. She has nothing to apologise for when it comes to being an incredible warrior, though.

"I was born a bossy bitch, so you can either roll with it or get rolled over."

Then there's the Glorious Fool and her crew. Basil, the aeon (Big Bird with an attitude); Hyruk, the giant reptilian ship's doctor; Nova, the navigator (Luna Lovegood and Kaylee rolled into one); Mabel, the ship's engineer; Caldswell, the captain; and of course Rupert, the cook, who's Devi's love interest.

I'll be honest, the romance wasn't my favourite part of the book, but it made for an important part of the plot development (though thankfully, not the focus). It drove a large part of Devi's motivations, for better or worse, and while I thought she made some foolish decisions because of it, they mostly made sense in the context of the story.

I could have happily read the entire book as a pure action-fest, and there's more than enough to satisfy an action junkie like me. Honestly, this would make a fantastic movie (trilogy, given the other books in the set). But there's so much more, especially the interplay of the various species and the world-building, the hyper-jumps and the plasmex (a type of energy - like the Force, it's present in everything) and of course, the relationships between characters. Also snark. So much snark.

“If it makes you feel better, though, Basil is the first on my list if we’re ever stranded in deep space and forced to eat one another. Aeons are most delicious.”

TL;DR: It's probably considered light reading, but I don't care. It's comfort reading with thrills and action galore and I stan.

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Hot and Badgered (Honey Badger Chronicles, #1)

Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Can we talk about how much I love Shelly Laurenston's characters? I love them. I love the way she writes them. I love the snark and the sass and the don't-give-a-shit attitudes and the love (sometimes grudging) and the way these shifter relationships just make sense. And I say this as someone who isn't the biggest fan of shifter novels.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books said it best in a review from 2016: "Among my favorite things about Laurenston’s writing is how very affirming and inspiring and a whole lot of fun it is, because angry, fearless women make room for themselves, they get shit done, and they’re the heroines. More honey badgers, please."

Again, I'm not a fan of most shifter stories. Werewolf romances leave me cold, for the most part (werewolf movies, eh). These worlds that Laurenston's built, though ... the fact that there aren't just wolves, that life isn't just about turning into a werewolf or hunting vampires and zombies, but about the lives those characters inhabit, well, that's my jam. Add a huge dose of snark and buttloads of action (fairly gory action, I might add), and I'm hooked. I hope I'm like Charlie in one of the other dimensions where another me is living. Possibly with Max's knife skills and lack of morals.

As for Stevie's mental issues, I adored the way they were handled. They just ... were. And yes, they needed to be handled and she needed to be on her meds and she freaks out A LOT but it's SO REAL and I know there are people who act that way and it doesn't make them crazy, just different. These characters act the way I imagine shifters really WOULD be acting in real life - not just Creature Of The Week.

And then there are the Dunn triplets ... I kept going back to reread their interactions because sibling squabbling has me laughing out loud and these - and the MacKilligan sisters - definitely caused more than one gleeful snort and a quick drag of the highlight key.

As for the deadbeat (a tame word in this case) dad, and the extended family - which doesn't consider the MacKilligan sisters to be family because they're hybrid, aka mixed breed ... seeing so many of them put in their place caused so much schadenfreude it's a little embarrassing. Still, I can tell there's a buttload more trouble on the way, and I am HERE FOR IT.

I really liked that the romance was a slow burn and so this read more like an action novel than anything else (so don't get it if you think this is more like normal shifter romances, I guarantee you it's not).

Plus, the dog, and his insolence, and basically cock-blocking the romance, what a little (giant) sod. Laurenston and her dogs.

This book made me SO HAPPY. And that's really what I want in what feels like the end times.

Aside from The Call of Crows series and the Dragon Kin (written as G.A. Aiken), the Honey Badger series looks set to shoot to the top of my favourites, the books I need to read when the world around me is sucktastic as hell. I'd say we need a TV series so I can enjoy that while rereading for the umpteenth time.

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Home by Nnedi Okorafor

 

Home by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A world in which to immerse oneself

This is a world of fascination, tradition, frustration, exultation. The world-building - incredible. Alien species that are so Other - not simply humanoid with a different set of cultures of values - that they are truly incomprehensible. The living ship that is pregnant - reminiscent of Moya in Farscape.

But beyond that, a world so foreign it is beautiful. The frustration of inter-personal dynamics. Our familial relationships that are fraught with irritation, too much in-depth knowledge, and yet, love... somewhere (I don't mind saying that I experienced outright anger at the way Binti's sister and "best friend" patronised her).

Sometimes, in my standard, daily, 21st-century existence, I vaguely wish for something different. A different life. And when I see a life like Binti's - or the one she is expected to lead - I'm glad I have my own. But then the lives of the Enyi Zinayira... they call to me. How wonderful that this author can make someone from a totally different lifestyle and culture to the humans in her book, feel as though they are living her character's life.

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The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin

 

The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Birthing of cities

Short but sweet, this is one of the best pieces I have ever read. The author's love of New York is clearly fierce, while acknowledging its faults. With an insider knowledge of the city that never sleeps, N. K. Jemisin weaves a tale that is fascinating, exciting and endearing all at once. The idea of a city using its suburbs in battle is new to me; but land feeling the lives and deaths of its inhabitants is not. This tale blends both, along with social themes (race, sexuality, homelessness, police brutality, gentrification), fantasy, and a good sprinkling of Eldritch horror. I rarely give five stars, but this novella deserves all of them. Highly recommended.

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