Tuesday, January 25, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo

 



You Sexy Thing is a space opera novel - and presumably the opener in a series - by well known SF/F author  (although usually for short fiction) Cat Rambo.  The novel features a crappy world - a galaxy filled with empires with wishes on expansion, war and control, as well as pirates, rich assholes, and more - and a cast of people who escaped from the militaries of one of those empires by becoming restaurantors.  The result is a space opera in the vein of Tim Pratt's The Axiom or Valerie Valdes' Chilling Effect (Both of which were really good), although it's a bit darker than either of those series.  

Still, even with it not quite being as humorous as those two series, I liked You Sexy Thing a good bit.  The story takes place from a Third Person omniscient point of view (as pointed out by the dedication), and uses that perspective to give us a cast that is very very likable, and who you will easily start to care about as they face rough situations.  Those situations wind up in some dark places, and not every character survives, but the wit of some aspects of the situation and the likability of the cast, and the very solid enjoyable prose and dialogue makes it easy to keep reading.  This appears to be the start of a new series, with several sequel hooks, and I'll be very interested to see those followed up upon.  

Trigger Warning: Torture.  


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Niko Larson, former Admiral of the grand military of the Holy Hive Mind, got herself and her unit out of the Hive Mind's clutches the only way she knew how - by pretending to be "artists", in this case master chefs and opening a restaurant on TwiceFar station.  There Niko and her former crew, and a few others, try to make their restaurant work, financially secure, so they can retire in peace, and be free from the Holy Hive Mind's clutches forever....and so that Niko can attend to other unfinished business from long ago.  

And so when a critic who could make or break the restaurant arrives for a meal, Niko and her beloved team is on edge - a feeling that only gets worse when the meal is interrupted by an explosion, a lost princess, and a voyage on a sentient bio-engineered space ship that they have no way to control.  Soon Niko and her crew will realize that the past isn't content to let them escape it, and they'll need some major luck and improvisation to survive what it throws their way......
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As I mentioned above the jump, You Sexy Thing is written in third person omniscient, which means (for those unaware) that it takes place a the third person voice that can seemingly hear and understand basically every character's thoughts at once, although it does tend to tell various parts from more specifically single character's perspective.  It uses this to tell a story of a kind that many readers will be familiar with: you have a found family crew of oddballs from different backgrounds and species, led by a captain they all trust (Niko), you have two outsiders - princess Atlanta and the ship itself, the You Sexy Thing - who learn from their comradery new parts of living and how to be members of the family, and of course you have a galaxy out there that will test those bonds to the limit.  

And this works for the most part because the characters are highly enjoyable and not just one note characters.  Niko, who is arguably the lead character, cares for her crew first and foremost, but has always been one who tries to do the right thing, even when that's gotten her in trouble, and is haunted desperately by both the one person she's never been able to make it up to from her past.  She's also highly knowledgeable and smart in her actions, rarely rash, and thus makes a great wise mentor and leader of the team.  Her second in command Dabry, is really fun in his full on love of cooking (despite that field being meant as an illusion) and his caring for everyone else, and how he wants to share his knowledge - especially of cooking - with everyone.  And the others in the crew (I'm not going to list each one) generally work really well too, from prophet Lassite to touch-loving Skidoo.  

And then there are the newcomers - Atlanta and You Sexy Thing - both of whom have to learn from them all in various ways.  For Atlanta, that's about a galaxy that is not just the bubble she grew up in as a potential Heir, and about people who might want to be with her without expecting anything in return.  For You Sexy Thing, it's about being a person in its own right, and about emotions, and about there being more out there than simply following orders boringly from whoever happens to own its title.  Neither character is really that original, but they're done very well and highly enjoyable and form a structure around which the plot revolves.  

That plot generally works pretty well, with it managing to go in dark places (the dialogue remains often light to keep it from getting too dire) that may surprise some readers.  So you have the empire that wants to absorb them all into its hive mind like it does with all original and troublesome thinkers (to subsume them into the collective), you have a pirate who wants vengeance for Niko being the one person to try to cross them years back, and you have the person left behind by Niko who was tortured and embittered and has become someone else in the process.  Some of the plot points may be predictable (you will guess one the moment a character shows up), but a lot of them are dealt with in ways that are far from easy, because these moments all feel like they have real significance. 

They don't quite all work - the omniscient narrative seems to skirt over two crew member's mindsets so you never really see their perspectives, and one of them makes a major decision midway through that doesn't surprise the rest of the cast, but felt out of the blue to me as the readers since I didn't really have any feel for that cast member.  And some may find the darkness in the book's third act, when they get involved with the pirates, to be too much.  But the cast was enjoyable enough for me to not mind it, and the ending provides both satisfying temporary closure and enough sequel hooks to keep me curious what happens next. 

The result is solid very enjoyable space opera, even if it's not quite up to the greatness of some of the similar books I've read.  Worth your time and I'll be back.   

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