Barbary Station

Barbary Station, R.E. Stearns. I really wanted to like this book. Lesbian space pirates! And the first couple chapters were great; I liked the characters and the set-up. Unfortunately, as I read further, it completely lost momentum for me. The action seemed haphazard, things just kept incoherently happening without either much sense of moment-to-moment drama or powering the story forward, until eventually it was time to be done. I hate to say it but I think it should have been a novella; I feel like there was a pretty awesome novella buried in here. :(

A Natural History of Dragons

A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan, first book of the five-book Lady Trent series nominated for the Best Series Hugo. I believe it was ursula who thought I would enjoy this, and, indeed, I did! Appealing protagonist, fast-paced story, fun mix of "caught up in events" and actual bio-geekery. I thought Brennan did a really nice job with the voice, giving her some self-awareness of where she's willing to reject social propriety, some self-awareness as to where she *does* have the biases of her cultural background, and some cases where she's blithely oblivious to her own cultural assumptions. Which added up for me to a great faux-British faux-Victorian lady adventuress voice. (It's the kind of second-world fantasy where the map does not resemble Earth but you can assign correspondences to the countries.)

The big question: do I want to read the rest of the series? Well, I do. This book did not seem hugely deep or powerful but it was fast and fun and pleasant to spend time in and why wouldn't I want to do more of that. I'm not sure with what *priority* I want to do that, though... I have a lot of Hugo reading to do before I want to be diving into serieses. (A novel, two novellas, two novelettes, a short story, two Campbell novels, one more YA, the entire graphic category... I'm getting antsy to see what we're getting in the packet so I know what library queues I need to get into...) Anyways, given sufficient time, I assume I'll read more of these.