{"id":8640,"date":"2013-06-17T15:55:31","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T21:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8640"},"modified":"2013-06-17T16:12:49","modified_gmt":"2013-06-17T22:12:49","slug":"captain-cosette-by-r-bruce-sundrud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/captain-cosette-by-r-bruce-sundrud\/","title":{"rendered":"Captain Cosette by R. Bruce Sundrud"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"captain_cosette\"<\/a>So I saw this book in my alsobots on Amazon a few months ago, and it looked interesting so I figured I’d give it a shot.\u00a0 The cover is admittedly pretty bad, but it has two of my favorite things in the universe (space and girls), and besides, I’ll sample just about anything.\u00a0 A few days later, I realized the sample folder on my Kindle was getting pretty big, so I decided to go through and clear some of it out.<\/p>\n

Well, I ended up buying this one.\u00a0 The beginning really hooked me, and the rest of the book did not disappoint.<\/p>\n

Captain Cosette<\/em> is basically a Cinderella story set in space, except instead of getting glass slippers and going to the dance, Cosette goes to war and becomes a knock-out starship pilot.\u00a0 It’s military sci-fi with a lighter edge than Drake or Haldeman.\u00a0 And it’s good.\u00a0 I think I read from the 36% mark to the end without stopping.\u00a0 Sundrud is really good at making you care about his characters and then putting them in peril.<\/p>\n

One thing that I really enjoyed were all the pulpy Renee Chevalier books that Cosette always reads, which were really just tongue-in-cheek references to modern pop-culture phenomena like Twilight<\/em> and Casablanca.\u00a0 It broke the fourth wall at times, but I always found them hilarious, especially with some of the twists they add at the end.<\/p>\n

Unlike some other sci-fi books that I’ve started recently and failed to finish, the science fictional elements here are not just window dressing–they really drive the plot.\u00a0 I thought the teaching machine was particularly interesting, especially when it … well, I won’t give away any spoilers.\u00a0 And of course, the lost colonies and border worlds were also fascinating.\u00a0 Cosette comes from a backwards farming planet, and the way she thinks about things at first, you really get the sense that this has been her whole universe.\u00a0 As she gradually comes to understand the geo- (astro?) politics of Union and Alliance, her awareness expands, and so does yours as the reader.\u00a0 It’s very cool.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of things I wish this book had done a little better.\u00a0 The world is not nearly as immersive as I wanted it to be, and sometimes it feels like the characters are hurrying from place to place.\u00a0 Also, sometimes the characters seemed to blend together a bit.\u00a0 There was enough to differentiate them, but at times they sounded almost the same.\u00a0 None of these issues took much away from my overall enjoyment of the book, however.\u00a0 The story was solid.<\/p>\n

So yeah, if you like the kind of stuff I like to write, you’re probably going to love this one.\u00a0 At $2.99 for the ebook, you really can’t go wrong.\u00a0 Even if you’re not a huge military sf fan, if you like Cinderella stories (and who doesn’t?), this one is definitely worth checking out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I saw this book in my alsobots on Amazon a few months ago, and it looked interesting so I figured I’d give it a shot.\u00a0 The cover is admittedly pretty bad, but it has two of my favorite things in the universe (space and girls), and besides, I’ll sample just about anything.\u00a0 A few… Continue reading Captain Cosette by R. Bruce Sundrud<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"My review of Captain Cosette by R. Bruce Sundrud:","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[834,112,833,615,202,166],"class_list":["post-8640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-breaking-the-4th-wall","tag-character","tag-immersion","tag-indie-reviews","tag-military-science-fiction","tag-setting","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2fm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8640"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8644,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8640\/revisions\/8644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}