Charon Dunn

To be honest, I did not have very high expectations of this book. The entire book is formatted as a diary entry where our protagonist Melina recounts her difficult childhood and later experience as a sex slave, and finally a translator for an invading alien species. The book has a very grim story, to say the least.

It is a funny thing, but what gave me reserves early on ceased bothering me because the story is so damn enthralling. I became quite vested in Melina's success despite the odds. Perhaps it is because I am a multilingual speaker, so I felt quite identified with Melina. Just like her, I had teachers dismiss my initially stumbling Spanish. Teachers nowadays are much more attuned to the benefits of billingualism in children, but the book is written with so much vagueness that it could have very well taken place in the year 2000. The book has a few phrases in Spanish that are all corrrect (they are only missing their correct diacritics).

I quite enjoyed how the author cleverly toys with the mixture of culture in the alien language. They have dozens of words for troop positions and star ships (kind of like Klingon), but lack all kinds of phrases for things like saying thank you or please. We also get to learn a few other things about the alien culture such as their kind of weird lab grown capybara stew (head and tail included) and that some of the aliens caught Moctezuma's revenge.

As for Melina, she is very well written, with a realistic manner of hiding her true emotions to appease her volatile mother Karen. I believe her mother has Borderline Personality Disorder, which explains the anger outbursts, dangerous behavior (such as her covert drug addiction) and antagonizing her daughter in every way. Plenty of books could have made the mother cartoonish and Melina detestable, but I felt a huge heap of sympathy for Melina and disdain for the mother. If this is what the author was going for in the reader, it worked with me.

Melina forms a prison friendship of sorts with a fellow brothel slave named Stella. It felt quite realistic they would not be quite like friends (their pimps would beat them up if they displayed overt closeness), but they aren't rivals either. While Melina has displayed a huge desire to learn the alien language, Stella is quite the opposite and prefers to teach the aliens English and Spanish. Their friendship stays amicable for the rest of the novel, but they never become truly close.

As for the aliens, they are quite an interesting lot. Banscu seems decent enough, even more because he is a blue collar grunt. I would have wanted to see female aliens, that might be the one thing missing for me. The story later o focuses on the alien commandar Moravin who is business oriented, has some good qualities, but ultimately is the worst asshole of the bunch.

In a nutshell, I didn't feel intimidated by the grim subject matter of this novel. It was handled quite well and the mental illness representation is also going in this book's favor. The telling format feels awkward at first, but it does feel quite reminiscent of Spanish language fiction and it helps move the grim scenes in fast forward to the main story conflict.

At only 180 pages long, this book is a fast read and I pretty much expected the ending it had. It was handelled well, and interestingly, loosely inspired by the conquest of Tenochtitlan by the Spanish. I am quite impressed the author did such a realistic job portraying multilingual character despite being a monolingual English speaker.

A part of me wanted to give this book 4.5 stars because I did quite enjoy it a lot, but there is a line of the book at the final page featuring author being very supportive of generated AI images. This felt morally wrong for me because the technology was based on theft of copyrighted works and generated images are insanely polluting to the environment by consuming huge quantities of potable water. So, I have oprted to give the book a solid 4 stars.… (meer)

Leroy Knight is fifteen, is nice enough looking, and has no particular talents. This is a real problem in his nation of Braganza in 3147, because talent is what his culture is all about. His family loves him, and worries for him.

Then a silly accident gives him a little notoriety, an accidental resemblance to an international clashball sports hero, Rufus Marshall. In an especially silly publicity stunt, Rufe's team, the Vanram Rams, invites Leroy and his family to the championship game.

What could possibly go wrong?

A rival nation with its own secret agenda uses the championship game to launch a terrorist attack. Leroy's family are among the people carried off as part of that secret agenda, and Leroy himself is an accidental accomplice in the assassination of Vanram's prime minister. He winds up escaping on a sailing ship with a very eclectic collection of fellow passengers, including Rufe Marshall, a doctor named Quicksilver, the dockmaster of Vanram's capital city of Argalia, a mysterious beauty named Risha, and oh, yes, the rival team's mascot, an oddly striped dog.

Except Hina isn't a dog. She's a thylacine, one of several extinct species recreated in this era. Thylacines were marsupial carnivores, in our time relatively recently extinct, and referred to as the Tasmanian tiger or the Tasmanian wolf. Hina quite quickly bonds with Leroy. Leroy himself gets a new name; he got hit on the head in the course of the excitement, and temporarily had a shaky memory. The others started calling him Sonny because he couldn't at first remember his name. It stuck.

Sonny Knight expects to get home fairly quickly. He has no idea what adventures he's in for.

Every one of this quite random mix of people has their own mission in the aftermath of the attack--and that includes the captain of the ship, Kai, who is determined to get needed repairs with minimal additional damage.

The plot here is a lot of fun, but it's only half the fun. This is a fascinating future Earth, with new geography (a meteorite did substantial damage), new cultures and species (see previous, a meteorite did substantial damage), and varying levels of technology the cultures are able to effectively maintain.

I really like Sonny, and he learns lessons near and dear to my own heart.

This is just rollicking good fun. Recommended.

I bought this book.… (meer)