REVIEWED BY J.S.

Genre: YA sci fi (super hero, post apocalyptic)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, trans*

Warnings: none

Rating: four stars

Review

Jess is an ordinary child of superhero parents. Powerless herself and searching for something meaningful to do with her life, Jess takes an after school job in a tech lab and (accidentally) ends up working for the ‘villains’, aside the Very Hot Love Interest (and former volleyball star). When villains across the country start going missing, it’s up to Jess and her friends to solve the mystery.

From a diversity standpoint, this book was amazing. From a pacing standpoint, it was…slow. I’m not generally a YA reader so this could just be my lack of familiarity with the genre, but nothing happened in the book until about one hundred pages in. Once things got going, they kept a steady pace, but I almost DNF. The first half of the book is spent with very high school issues – love interests, family, fitting in, clubs, and after school jobs. For a high schooler or junior higher, this is probably welcome ground and the pacing appropriate. For an adult reader, I had a hard time connecting, but I realize I’m not the target audience.

The middle of the book was strong, and I enjoyed the reveals and the romance. The setting as well, with the world, the insights into immigrant Chinese and Vietnamese culture, gave the town a refreshing face lift from the ‘standard’ near-future narrative. High school scenarios were well done and felt very real.

The end action was ‘surprising yet inevitable,’ which is exactly what you want in these types of books. My only real quibble with the book was the very cliche’ villain info plot dump at the end, but that’s in keeping with the genre and feel of the book, so it’s a minor quibble at best.
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Overall, this book is a much needed diverse addition to the near-future sci fi genre, and it’s nice to see a super hero who isn’t just some rando white kid. Younger readers will no doubt find the book captivating.

RATING: 3.75 stars

Special Agent Ryan O'Connor is starting to get her life back together in the aftermath of a shooting and her boss's arrest. Despite scheduling incompatibilities preventing them from seeing one another, she and Allison are doing great; she's preparing to return to full duty; and she's trying to block out the voices of those who've been doubting she still has what it takes to do her job.

Ryan should've known things were never that simple. When a ghost from her past reappears without warning, blindsiding her in a way she never could have expected, Ryan’s entire existence is badly shaken. She’d always believed that the best protection any woman could ever have—aside from a gun—was courage, but now she finds herself asking a question she never thought she’d need to answer: Who protects the Secret Service?


Cover Artist: Melody Pond  (Yes! This must surely be a pseudonym, but it's an AWESOME one. Gosh, I miss River Song so much). 
Genres: Intrigue & Thriller
Purchase link: Bold Stroke Books
Reviewed by Rebecca
​The great things that led to a high rating...

This was a rather good book, and that's coming from someone who doesn't often pick-up something that isn't sci-fi or literary fiction. The writer has a fabulous ability to convey and explore emotion. There are wonderful descriptions of our narrator's reactions to various events, many of which felt very real and believable. All of this kept me highly engaged for the majority of the story, which I finished in a couple of days. With little kids invading my space all the time, that's a quick read for me, and means I just felt myself needing to come back to the story. 

​Even though I hadn't read the first two books, it didn't take long to be quite familiar with the MC's personality. It isn't an easy feat to ease a totally new reader into a series in Book 3, but they've managed to do it!

The cast of characters are interesting and I enjoyed reading about most of them, including Ryan's father, and Claudia Quinn. Plus, is it just me or is there something between Quinn and the President's daughter ('Hurricane')? The characters really are a strong point, though. We get a strong sense of who everyone is, how they feel, how they react to things and why, and what tends to motivate their behaviour. 

The aspects that held me back from 5 stars...

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD
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I found having nearly 30% of the book being dedicated to the running race at the start to be a little excessive for a novel presented as being about action, but the inter-agency event did a very good job of catching-up the new readers and establishing relationships and so it certainly wasn't wasted in any way. I absolutely love well-written descriptive passages, but it depends on the book's genre, cover, and blurb as to what the reader's expectations surrounding that will likely be. At times I felt their were too many metaphors on the back of one another, with some paragraphs being one metaphor about emotional state after another. BUT - they were good ones so I got over it fairly fast ;) The sex scene also went on a bit long for my taste, but plenty of other readers will appreciate the very thing I didn't particularly love.  That's one of the things with reviews, isn't it? Preference. If you like explicit love scenes, it'll work well. If you're like me and not really a fan of them, you may skip a few pages in the first half - not a big deal, though, and certainly not a reflection of the writing.

It was good to see a bisexual (or pansexual, perhaps?) character in the form of Allison. Though, I did wonder at the use of the phrase "fly her freak flag" when our main character, Ryan, was reflecting on how accepting she is of Allison's sexuality. I may be being too precious on this, but the phrase stood out to me as a little less than accepting. Sometimes though, colloquialisms that are common in the USA don't quite make sense to me as an Australian, just as some phrases in my book were flagged by American readers as grammatically incorrect or nonsensical, but they're Aussie idioms that are appropriate for the character's context. I'll leave that to others to reflect on. I could've lived with out it though.

The book has, for better or worse, a lot in common with Radclyffe's Honor series. Being original is incredibly hard to do, and the book is a really easy-going read. I wouldn't recommend it if you're looking for something less formulaic when compared to super popular lesfic, something different and unique - because it isn't. But if you LOVE the formula of many popular lesfic books, this is a really competent and interesting addition to the cop-drama trope. I enjoyed reading it. I actually read 35% of it whilst getting a painful tattoo done on my back, so thanks so much for keeping me distracted, Kara. A. McLeod! :)

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD
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Okay. So here's the main thing I didn't like about the book. And I'm so sorry to the author because, you know what, this is my personal preference and something I've long disliked about lesfic.

Rape. Why does someone always have to get raped? If I were to hazard a guess, I think that a woman gets raped by a man in anywhere between 50-80% of the lesfic books I've read, especially those that fall into genre fiction like thriller/action/sci-fi action. I prefer genre fiction to romance, so that means I am working from a limited scope of books when I make this call.

I've discussed my problems with this plot device before, and so my little rant here isn't really about this book alone. But the last 15% of the story really lost me because I just thought 'Really? AGAIN?!' I want to see our writers find some other way to create drama, to explore a character's reactions to traumatic situations.  When the secondary health problem that came with the sexual assault in the book was introduced in the last 10% of the book, I think I really had just had enough - it's clear that the rape will probably be used as a huge point of conflict in subsequent books and I don't know if I have the emotional energy for it. Of course I know sexual assault is highly prevalent in society, and I don't need to tell the internet why this particular issue is one I'm so tired of reading about. I don't want the issue to be ignored in any way. Nope, nope, nope. But I do want to see a more reasonable number of occurrences of it in books.

​Just like some people (including me) are tired of our LGBTIQA+ characters (or their direct allies) being killed off, I'm tired of them being sexually abused in just disproportionate numbers, and for the same reasons that the Lesbian Death Trope is an issue. ​ 

But if you aren't an picky as I am about this particular plot device, please don't be deterred. For the other 85% of the book I was really enjoying it!

​NOTE: This book has also been reviewed by Rebecca for this blog. At times, we will review the same novel more than once if different members of the review team read the novel. We are more likely to spotlight debut authors in this manner, or books where different reviewers had quite different opinions.
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Genre: sci fi (light, semi-historical, spy)
Pairings: f/f, m/f, m/m
Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis gay, cis bisexual
Warnings: gore
Rating:  three stars
Review

Ridiculously attractive secret agent Diana (CIA), along with a host of male colleagues, is kidnapped by the KGB, turned superhuman, and stranded in the woods of North Carolina. Another Very Hot Woman, Nikola, a secret agent for the KGB, is tasked with tracking them down. Diana and Nikola are former lovers, both very deadly, and both out for blood.

On the scifi

This was very, very light scifi, and I think that worked for the piece. Our spies have various mutations (the mechanisms by which they get them is a bit of handwavium) that, more than anything else, renders them fundamentally immune to death. One has a third eye (literally) that allows him to see the future. One is part lizard. One has blue skin (checkbox: blue skinned alien trope in scifi. Love it). All (most?) appear to be able to regenerate after extensive injury. An appropriate level of gory language was spent exploring this, which I appreciated. What good is self-regeneration if we can’t hear the bones snapping?

On the characters

The strongest part of this book was the characters, but it was the weakest part as well. When we were given the backstory snippets, the characters came alive and the story was this beautifully woven tapestry of POV and history. When we were in the ‘now’, the characters were clunky, the POV too hoppy, and none of them really seemed to connect with one another. There were too many different names (Agent A, for instance, might have two or three names used in the book, because agent names change) and too many characters in places for me to keep them straight. The lesbian couple discussed on the back blurb didn’t end up playing as central a role as I had hoped, given the book description, but what was there was very well done. They had good chemistry, I just wish there’d been more time to explore it.

In fact, the only time I really connected with the characters was during their backstory flashbacks. Ruby, the sort of unwilling heroine, was a good focal point for the ‘in the now’ parts, but she didn’t get a lot of screen time. Again, I think my connection with the flashbacks came from the lack of head hopping and fewer characters, and the… the feels the characters had in those scenes. In the forest scenes it was mostly omg we’ve got to get out of here but we can’t die so this really sucks! Yes, it does suck, Super Secret Agent Hotness, but I want to know more about your Super Secret Agent Girlfriend and why you now want to shoot her in the face.

In fact, I would pay cash money, right now, for a spinoff short that was just Diana and Nikola’s adventures in spy school.

Nikola: How do you use this watch thingie again?
Diana: Sweetheart, we’ve been through this. Turn the dial like so. *leans in*
Nikola: *punches Diana in the stomach* HAH! Gotcha! Bet you didn’t see that coming!
Diana: *sweeps Nikola’s legs and the two fall to the ground, punching and laughing* You call that a punch? Upstart! I made you!
*The duo fall to kissing*
 
Plot

The book lacked a through line, and it took me over half the book to figure out what the actual goal was for the characters other than ‘survive’. This made it really hard to connect with anyone, and is probably responsible for my character confusion, as stated above. I didn’t mind the flashbacks at all, and the head hopping was frustrating but manageable, but the lack of a distinct goal and focus for the characters, especially at the beginning, was hard for me. I think this potentially could have been circumvented by spending a bit more time on the relationships between the characters upfront, which would have driven the tension of the final showdown up quite a bit.

Cover art

The cover is gorgeous. Natasha Snow really hit it out of the park with this one. Swoonworthy.

Overall
If you’re into mod-scifi, or spy thrillers (especially heavily character-driven ones), this book is likely up your alley. You can buy Seven-Sided Spy in ebook here and paperback here.

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