rubeusbeaky's reviews
538 reviews

Short Version: Not enough zombies.
Longer Version: This book is just a copy of "Pride and Prejudice" which someone copy and pasted into a Word document, then replaced various words, adding "zombie", "ninja", and excessive bodily humor references. There is little to no adaptation or wit. And how a zombiefied British countryside relates to Eastern martial arts bewilders me. The gimmick was funny for a chapter or two, but not an entire book. Not to mention, the book retains all the difficulties of the original, chiefly that the entire plot happens off-scene in letters.

This book is a mashup of Hunger Games, Zootopia and Handmaid's Tale, and I'm just wondering... who asked for this?! Triggers, triggers, triggers; there is both a trigger warning at the front and a list of assault and abuse hotlines at the back. And yet despite being such unsettling subject matter... the book also has many boring, cliche story beats. I found myself hurrying through the book because I /wasn't/ enjoying it, and just wanted the nightmare to be over. I get that there are devastating, sensitive topics which folks need fictional mirrors to help them explore... but this was both "too real" and Uncanny Valley, traits I don't go /looking/ for when I pick up a book.

This book, unfortunately, fell to the same curse as the Game of Thrones TV show: It starts incredibly strong, pulling you in with its ambience; then midway you start to wonder "Which of these characters am I meant to be rooting for? I don't know that I like any of them."; and by the end the author is patting herself on the back for the importance of storytellers, and it makes you wonder why you bothered sitting through this tale in the first place.

This book had a strong opening... but became incredibly disappointing the minute Darrow entered the above-ground city. Every major plot beat or character moment was lifted straight from Hunger Games. Every bit of action or flavor was The Lightning Thief meets Battle Royale, or Lord of the Flies even. Those mashups might sound exciting, but they came across as crass, even as plagiarism. Everything original - all the space-age technology and culture - was left in the dust in favor of land battles and defecation, which fantasy novels have detailed before, ad nauseum. I regret that the fact that this book takes place IN SPACE, IN THE FUTURE, meant nothing.

If you want a better space-age civil war, watch The Expanse.

CHARMING! That is the magic word for this book: charming. Maybe I'm a sucker for British-isms, and I know here and there were some usual rom-com tropes, but the author has finesse with her writing, and the characters were full and lovable. If Gilmore Girls were a ghost story it would be this book. Absolutely adored it <3.

A good sequel, but for some reason not as engrossing as the first? I admit that could entirely be a Me thing. But I found that the descriptions of dinosaur-rider combat were new and exciting in the first book, and tedious repetition in this one. I found Melodia to not be treated seriously enough, for the whole book to be more vulgar than the first... Nitpicky things. And I found the central conflict to be too derivative of Game of Thrones. Can we say "White Walkers"?

I feel bad that this book is SO profoundly bad, because the authors are doing amazing work for literacy and the LGBTQ community. Sadly, having an idea, and executing it with art and finesse, are two different things. Imagine if a kid in middle school/high school were reading the "Twilight" series for fun and "The Once and Future King" for school... had a dream about what they had read... And then wrote it all down in a dream journal. That is this book. It started as an odd choice (literally bringing the characters from The Once and Future King into space with a group of woke, queer teens), but as the book progressed it got laughably bad, confusing, and even infuriating. Where do I even begin...

1) Trying to show positive, queer relationships/characters in mainstream YA... while falling into the the cliche representation of "all queer people are raunchy, flirty, slutty, makeup-and-makeover obsessed clothes-horses." Seriously, in a moment when Merlin is despairing and ashamed because he got someone killed... a hot guy takes his shirt off, cuts Merlin's hair, and gives him a pair of tight jeans, and that makes Merlin feel all better. :/

2) Too much in one book. Space is big, turns out. And weird! It should take AGES for ships to sail between planets. Time should be experienced differently between sailors and locals. Each planet should have its own topographical and atmospheric difficulties to overcome. The ships alone should require some kind of fueling, repairing, something, to keep them zipping all over the place. Inventing and accounting for these details alone in a story is a HUGE responsibility, and why Sci-Fi has its own genre. But the authors ignored all of those details which might put a wrinkle in the action, and instead had the team zipping here and there and breathing all the air, and lasting a year without water, and having an endless pantry full of snacks!... Being flippant about the space setting was bad enough, but then the literal cast of "The Once and Future King" enters the narrative, and Merlin gives us the five point plan for raising an Arthurian legend: Find Arthur, train Arthur, nudge him onto a throne, defeat a Big Bad, unite humanity... Those five points could have EACH been a book. Instead, the first FOUR got squashed into this book. And again, literally. The Arthur wasn't nudged onto a galactic counsel somewhere, a metaphorical seat of power. They were literally crowned after a joust on a Medieval Tourist Attraction Planet.

3) Oh yeah, every planet has one function. I hate this trope, this book is not the first to do this. But think of how much diversity is on our planet, is in one country, one city, one neighborhood! But in space, for some reason, we have Prison Planet, Medieval Tourist Attraction Planet, Nature Preserve Planet, and Mall Planet. Why.

4) Tonal whiplash. Remember I mentioned before how Merlin's shame was cured by abs? The entire book is insensitive like that. Another character is murdered in a mall, and the team should be grief-stricken, but instead they make a joke about how the dead person will at least be surrounded by snacks....

5) The characters are not real. They have physical descriptions, and gender identities, and sexual preferences. But they are not real. Their motivations make no sense. Their gullibility makes no sense. Examples: Everyone in-universe accepts the premise that the main character is Arthur the Last Airbender, and immediately helps Merlin to achieve his 5 Point Plan. Nobody calls Merlin crazy. Nobody has scant knowledge of the Arthurian legend because /centuries/ have passed since it was written down by T.H. White. Nobody tries to find a "logical" explanation for why Merlin is able to do magic, or for why Merlin's "prophecy" seems to take shape. Nobody fights the "we're doomed to repeat the same narrative as Arthurs passed". And Merlin's two biggest foils aren't even the Big Bad, they are two classic characters - Morgana and Nimue - who thwart Merlin...because... reasons? It is never properly explained what these women get in return for foiling Merlin. But I think the biggest grievance for me was right at the end, when two characters who have been imprisoned for years, exposed to the plague, nearly frozen to death, turned to stone, captured and tortured and watched their family murdered before their eyes...are cooing about becoming grandparents to baby Mordred... It just doesn't seem like a genuine reaction, after everything they've been through.

6) Literally Arthur. I'm sorry, I just didn't get this gimmick at all. It's a retelling of the Arthurian legend, with a bisexual (?) girl Arthur this time. In space! Great!!! That's a lot of meat, I want to bite into that story... It's going to have literal Merlin, Morgana and Nimue, all of whom are responsible for doing terrible things... Hard to cheer for them, but okay, complicated characters, cool! Keep going. There is literally a Medieval planet, where they attempt to maintain period accuracy not just in their tourist attractions, but in their politics, forcing their world leader to marry at a young age whomever wins a joust... Odd... Not sure what this has to do with the space quest... And Lamarack literally has one hand (not a cyborg hand, just missing a hand, even though cyborgs exist), Kay is literally an oaf brawler brother who eats a lot, the queen is literally named Guinevere and she literally gets pregnant (sub-note 6a, Romanticizing pregnant teens in YA fiction! No! Pregnancy is hard! Birthing a baby is hard! Raising a baby is hard! And teen pregnancies are dangerous for both the baby and the mom. It's not cute, funny, quirky, honorable, romantic, or whatever other lie fiction tells impressionable readers.), there are LITERAL dragons!... This book would have been so strong if the elements of the Arthur legend were reincarnated into space-age avatars. If the dragon were a battleship, if the joust were between two racing hovercrafts, if the queen were a member of a galactic council where all the representatives were called kings and queens, if the galactic council were the round table!... So many little /parallels/ would have made this book smart and great. But by literally transplanting known characters, and their known story, into a setting that doesn't matter, and just...making them constantly horny... the book just reminds the reader of how much richer the /original/ story was.

It's hard to say what I want to about this book. The characters are all still real and lovable. The author has amazing finesse with her prose. But it shocked me that this book was unique, in that it didn't follow the POV characters of the first book, instead highlighting two new points of view. I love this as a concept <3. But in execution... the two new protagonists are SO honor-bound and Lawful Good that they stagnate for a lot of the book, afraid to take risks or address/resolve conflicts. Having the main characters just... /allow/ the book to happen to/around them is not as compelling as characters who take actions. It reminded me of some classic fiction, like Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations, and had me yelling-in-the-margins at the characters for being so self-denying. There is a payoff, but it takes about 95% of the book to get there :/. So while the first book was 5 stars from me, this sequel only gets a 4.