Wednesday, May 13, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Paul Krueger




Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge was the debut novel for author Paul Krueger, who also wrote last year's "Steel Crow Saga."  I really loved Steel Crow Saga (My Review Here) so I made a note to get to this novel eventually. So when I finally was going to get back into audiobooks during this quarantine, I decided to try it out.

And it's a very different novel than Steel Crow Saga, less serious in its themes (although SCS has a bunch of fun moments mind you) and featuring a main character who I didn't like nearly as much.  It's still a very fun novel, and if you want a short novel with an enjoyable plot, you'll probably like this one - especially if you're a fan of bars and cocktails. After all, this is literally a book in which properly mixed drinks can give you superpowers.  As I'm not really much of a drinker - and bars are very much not my thing - those aspects of this plot were a bit wasted on me, so I didn't love this book as much as I might have otherwise.


---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
Bailey Chen went to UPenn Business School and came away with.....what exactly?  Nothing, really, and so she's back living in her parent's house in Chicago, hoping networking with a high school classmates - who she barely talked to even in high school! - can help her get a job with the company behind the hot new music app out there.  And in the meantime, to make it worse, she's working as a barback at the bar run by Zane Whelan, her high school best friend....who admitted to having a crush on her just as school was ending and who she hadn't seen since.  Cleaning up vomit in the Nightshade Lounge, what a life.

But when Bailey mixes a drink using a strange-labeled liquor before closing up one night, she finds herself attacked by a monster....and killing it with a punch.  Soon she finds herself learning from Zane that there's a secret side of Bartending that she never knew: where mixed drinks lend skilled bartenders with the power to protect the spark of humanity from the monsters of the night.  But Bailey's introduction to the special world of the bartenders comes with two even more shocking things: the discovery that something strange is going on with the monsters that haunt Chicago, and the discovery that Bailey might have feelings for Zane, now her boss and who seems to have moved on.......
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Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge is told from the third person perspective of Bailey, aside from interludes at the end/beginnings of each chapter which are excerpts from "The Devil's Water Dictionary," which detail how to make a different mixed drink each chapter, the powers each drink confers, the history - often humorous - of how that drink was discovered, and of the ingredients involved therein.  As I noted above the jump, these interludes are kind of wasted on me - apart from the funny aside bits of them, my lack of interest in the drinks meant I just kind of skimmed through them by the end, to get back to Bailey's story.

Speaking of Bailey's story, it's a bit of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, part of Bailey's story is incredibly relatable to this millennial blogger: coming home from college unemployed and desperately looking for any way to get out of your parents house (parents who are nagging constantly about you finding something worthy of you, as if it's easy), finding old friends and classmates from HS having moved on in surprising directions....yeah that's pretty familiar.  And she's quick thinking and good hearted for the most part, which makes her a fun action hero in those sequences.

On the other hand, the romantic directions Bailey goes in this book are a major weakness and really made me not like her.  The idea that she might find herself attracted to a formerly just platonic HS friend who has changed quite a bit over the last few years?  That's believable, sure.  But when she knows he has a girlfriend, even putting aside her being a little intoxicated in this book, the book has her take actions that kind of make her a bit of a scumbag.  And yes, she immediately knows it's not acceptable, which is what makes this merely annoying and not an irredeemable character trait, but the book then bends over backwards to give her what she wants in this department - and no this is not really a spoiler given how the reader will see this coming all the way.  It works, but it basically allows her to get off scott free, which just was annoying.

Still, Bailey's positive traits do go a long way in aiding a plot that takes some fun twists and turns from beginning to end, with a number of really fun action scenes as Bailey and her fellow bartenders utilize a mixture of different types of cocktails to obtain a number of different powers for their fights against the monsters they fight.  And then there's the mysterious sought after lost cocktail: The Long Island Iced Tea (lol), and the potential conspiracy behind it all.....leading up to a very satisfying ending, aside from the romantic element. And the side characters all work really well for what little attention they're given: blind socialist and possibly paranoid mentor Vincent, trans man and proud (obsessed) Canadian Bucket and even the mysterious Mona.

The result is a book that I enjoyed, although the awkwardness of the romantic elements had me switching from audiobook to ebook midway through so I could skip past the awkward scenes I didn't quite like.  Not a bad book to try for fun, especially if you enjoy mixed drinks, but not something I can highly recommend either.
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