I read some great books this month and two of them had heroes called Ambrose.
The Darkness Outside Us, Eliot Schrefer. Ambrose wakes up on his spaceship knowing his mission - to rescue his sister, Minerva, who was the first settler on Saturn’s moon Titan and whose distress beacon has finally activated after a long period of non communication. He can’t, however, remember the launch itself, and he is surprised to find that his spaceship is twinned with a vessel from the other main Earth power - and contains an astronaut from there, Kodiak. Aided by the ship’s operating system (OS), they must prepare the ship for the rescue mission.
But the gap in Ambrose’s memories is not the only oddity. As they approach Saturn, more and more discrepancies become apparent between what they are told by the OS, and what they observe for themselves.
I really liked this book - it’s YA, gay romance, and it’s space horror, where a significant part of the horror is the sheer unbelievable vastness of space itself, set against the claustrophobic existence of a two-man spacecraft. Everything else is a spoiler and so I am going under this cut -
( Significant spoilers. )Awfully Ambrose. Lisa Henry & Sarah Honey. Ambrose is a struggling actor who supports himself and his faded former TV star mother by being a Bad Boyfriend; going on terrible dates with people & their relations in order to get rid of family pressure to be in a relationship or make the next partner seem so much better by comparison. Liam, who has a supportive but pushy family, hires Ambrose to get his relatives off his back, but their relationship starts turning real.
What I really liked about this was the setting, which is not just Australian and not just Sydney, but is very specifically in Newtown (and then Liam’s family’s vineyard in the Hunter Valley), as I spent two years living on the fringes of Newtown and a lot of time in it, to the extent that at the start of chapter 4 the characters are on a road I walked up and down most weekdays, and I felt warmly nostalgic. The characters are as specific as the setting (there’s an Australian glossary at the beginning) and Ambrose’s bad boyfriend act - and the cracks and tension that arise in it - are great.
Horribly Harry, Lisa Henry & Sarah Honey. So I then bought the sequel, in which Ambrose’s flatmate, Harry, who thinks he’s asexual, has taken over Ambrose’s job, and manages in the process to upset the brother of one of his bad dates so much that the guy empties a strawberry smoothie over him - and almost kills him due to Harry's strawberry allergy. Jack, the brother, has dropped out of university to work as a mechanic, and is overwhelmed with guilt to the extent that he ends up moving in with Harry - and Harry, much to his surprise, develops romantic feelings for Jack. I didn’t like this nearly as much - it’s not that it’s bad, and I do really like Harry’s long-running battle with a particular volunteer at his local op shop - but it was less compelling than the first book and the characters felt a lot younger, or at least a lot more immature. I will still snaffle the third one when it comes out, though (the Bad Boyfriend mantle is inherited by the remaining flatmate, Tristan, who has a no repeats approach to sex & dating), and it might be time to try the authors’ fantasy series.
Worrals Flies Again, WE Johns. Worrals is, once again, bored with her mundane job of ferrying fighter aircraft in WWII, but fortunately one of the Intelligence Branch shows up looking for a pilot who is fluent in French (Worrals conveniently spent a year in France before the war) to station herself in a dilapidated French chateau and fly urgent messages back to Britain. But when she and Frecks arrive (in their tiny plane with foldable wings, the better to hide in wine cellars), German soldiers are already in residence in the chateau, and Wilhelm von Brandisch, head of the Gestapo in occupied France, is sniffing around the area… Less flying and more spying in this one, and it rattles along swiftly, with plots and counterplots; Worrals has to be on her toes at all times, as do the readers. I totally fell for the bit with the booby-trapped landing field.
Vessel, Lisa A Nichols. The Sagittarius NASA space mission to an exoplanet on the other side of an Einstein-Rosen bridge is assumed lost - until Catherine Wells, the pilot, and the only one left of the six member crew, returns after a decade to a husband who’s moved on and a daughter who is now an adult. She has no memory of what happened after they landed on the exoplanet - yet, back on Earth, she starts losing time, and experiencing sudden violent rages towards suddenly unnatural seeming colleagues. Another mission to the same planet is about to launch, and the only one Cath can trust with her worries is Cal, a NASA scientist who thinks Cath knows more than she’s saying.
What this is good at is all the detail of an actual NASA mission, the jargon and day-to-day working lives of the staff and scientists. What this is bad at, unfortunately, is the plot, which is obvious, and the characters, some of whom have potential that doesn’t come off. Cath as an ambitious pilot whose husband washed out of training and who chose to leave him and their daughter for the mission is an interesting character, but never seems to quite click into place, and the relationship with Cal didn’t work for me at all. Also, while all the NASA stuff seems quite convincing, when I am in a position to comment on the science of a particular aspect it is clunkingly wrong. And capping it all off is the ending, in which the book just stops without committing to a resolution. It didn’t help that I read this right after
The Darkness Outside Us, but even so.
The 143-Storey Treehouse, Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton. I have retained very little of this as it just isn’t for me but the bit where strange creatures called hobyahs kidnap the characters in order to put them in bags and poke them with sticks was nicely child-level horror.
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