The Frog Princess, E.D. Baker

The Frog Princess is one of my sister’s favourite comfort-reads, so it was the first thing she thought to recommend when I had a reading challenge prompt to read something recommended by a family member. It takes a generic medieval-ish setting (castles, royalty, witches), and the usual Frog Prince story, and gives it a little twist to complicate it. If you’ve seen Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, you know the basic twist — apparently, the film was somewhat based on this book, though my sister disagrees about the whole idea. (Setting is different, characters different, etc, etc.)

It’s fun enough, though because it’s aimed at — well, I’m not good at judging: middle grade, perhaps? Whatever that means in British terms… — anyway, say middle grade, it’s pretty slight. It has a fairly clever and strong-minded heroine, who is not the perfect sort of princess — a princess who laughs in entirely the wrong way, and is clumsy about everything she does. That’s an okay role model for kids, even if the whole story basically rushes her towards adulthood and romance, whether she likes it or not.

The main male character is mostly insufferable. Randomly demanding kisses, acting as entitled as they come, boastful… The romance itself, though it has some cute moments, fails to enchant me.

In terms of other characters, there’s some interesting and funny stuff going on in the background, like the character of the snake and the bat. All in all, cute enough, though it’s not something I’ll come back to the way my sister does — wrong point in my life entirely for it to become charmingly nostalgic.

Rating: 3/5

This Savage Song, Victoria Schwab

Received to review via Edelweiss

I’ve been quite interested in this one ever since I saw Victoria Schwab talking about it on Twitter. I didn’t even have to know much about it: I was sold from the quotation that apparently sparked (though I haven’t, in fact, read Vicious yet, which was the source).

“Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”

That’s really the core of this book: monstrous humans and human monsters, and the interplay between them, and sometimes how difficult it can be to recognise. It took me a while to get into the world and really understand what was going on — for the first 10% I was a little confused — but I think the worldbuilding works well. All the questions I had initially were answered as I read on; you just have to do a little work as a reader, which is something I actually enjoy, so was very much fine with me.

I really like the concepts underlying this: the way Corsai, Malchai and Sunai are created, their attributes, the way the city is split into two halves. There was a lot of background stuff that I think can be developed a lot more, and I’m excited to read it in future books. There’s a lot of depth to the monsters as-is, too: their limitations, the differences between them, the way they interact. The bonds between the three Sunai are quite different, despite the claims of Leo that they’re monsters, just monsters, just implements of judgement.

The description “Romeo and Juliet + Sin City” was a misleading one, to my mind. There’s little, if any, romance, which is what people automatically think of when they think about Romeo and Juliet. I expected something more like a retelling, which this isn’t so much; it just shares themes — connection between two opposing sides, the splitting of the city, the expectations of family.

Overall, I found this fascinating — and I actually liked it more than A Darker Shade of Magic, which I enjoyed and which I know many people thought couldn’t get much better!

Rating: 4/5

Impulse, Dave Bara

I picked up Impulse because I have a weakness for space opera — probably because I was raised on a steady diet of Star Trek and Star Wars, Blake’s 7 and Babylon 5. Impulse is fun enough, with chases and traitors and first contact with (sort of) aliens, and dealing with romance on board ship, and conflicts between differing kinds of orders.

It’s fun, but kind of bland; others have done it better, and there wasn’t much contact with aliens. Both romances were straight out of Kirk’s playbook, really, and the main character is a mixture of mature and immature; inexperienced and cocksure; getting rank through privilege but also coincidentally being good enough for it, somehow… His fuck-ups don’t have major consequences for him (only for other people), and generally life goes along pretty easily for him — other people get hurt and die, but he makes it through and will be fine.

I found the ending extremely annoying — the nominal goal of the book isn’t reached, and it’s just… very unsatisfying. There’s more in the background that interested me that wasn’t brought out.

Still, fun enough to occupy a train journey. Not sure if I’ll read the rest of the series, though I think the second book is now out.

Rating: 2/5

Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor

Received to review via Bookbridgr

I’ve been meaning to pick Lagoon up ‘next’ for far too long, so hurrah, finally I have done so! I picked it up partway through New Year’s Eve, in fact, and finished it in one go: it’s a very lively, dynamic book, with various different points of view — including a swordfish who turns herself into a monster, the better to sabotage oil pipes on the sea bed. (It makes sense in context, I promise.) There’s a whole bunch of different people, people speaking Pidgin, LGBT people, a woman who is a marine biologist, people of all kinds of beliefs and none… and aliens, making first contact, for the first time, in Nigeria.

It’s an almost unique setting for a fairly common SF trope, in my experience: normally, like the big blockbuster movies, the aliens go to the President of the US, and don’t stop to wonder about the leader of Nigeria. And it brings in all kinds of elements that would be out of place in a USian setting: folklore and legends, witchy powers, superstitions about those (which aren’t gone in the “Western world”, but are different). All of this make it something fresh and different.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work for me — a bit too jumpy, a bit too chaotic, and perhaps I missed some key transitions or something, because I wasn’t always sure why one thing led to another — I described the narrative as ‘hopping’ when trying to talk about it to a friend. A slightly different storytelling style than I’m used to, perhaps. And I felt that some threads were just dropped: Ijele, for example, and the LGBT+ group who had a couple of chapters but then fizzled into nothing. (Which is especially bothersome to me when they’re used to ratchet up tension, and they’re actually in danger, and then the narration just… loses interest? Not cool.)

Lagoon is an interesting one, anyway, even though it’s not quite my thing.

Rating: 3/5