Posted by Hey y’all! So, wtf does part one mean? It means I’m too antsy and impatient to sit on a review. I’ll be posting reviews as I read through the finalists and then I’ll post Kristen’s review with our final score when she finishes and has a review.
Edit! Kristen has now reviewed this book and her review is HERE which means I can leave my own score at the bottom!
Sometimes I’ve heard about a book before it hits the finals and other times I’m completely in the dark about the author and the book. This time it’s the latter and I had no idea what to expect going into it. I have to admit that although I read all the finalist reviews/watched them — the chaos that was November utterly erased everything in my brain. There was an involuntary reset button.
This book kicks off the way many do, with a young kid with a less than happy home life just trying to make it day to day. His mother is dead and always has been (from his perspective) as she died giving birth to him. His dad makes this his problem and berates him for it despite that obviously not being his fault. His dad is a homophobe, as it feels like most of this society is, and when he gets caught doing more feminine or gay things like painting his nails, he gets the shit kicked out of him. To try and escape all this he makes a friend with another social outcast and they build a fort together. They’re happy to be best friends despite coming from different societies/races. She’s got horns/nubs all over her body and her whole race is shunned into working the worst jobs, living on the worst wages, and being thought of as ‘less than’ by most. Lago is a more open minded and friendly lad and so her nubs don’t bother him at all. Most of her race tries to hide their nubs but she decorates her own with ribbons and bright colors, drawing attention to what most people feel she should be ashamed of — I liked her character 🙂
Things go awry when a strange fox comes running panicked into the same area where Lago has his secret hideaway fort. She’s badly injured, bleeding, and looking to him for help. Lago can hear the hounds coming and the hunters won’t be far behind. He shows her into his fort, closes the door, and addresses the hunters. There’s something off, though. The hunters look more like soldiers and they’re super fucking serious about finding this fox. It’s a little weird, and Lago has some flags go up and decides to lie about where the fox is. This super creepy and intense lady asks for his name then she commits it to memory and then goes along her way. She comes back later in the story and fucks with Lago pretty hard because he didn’t hide a fox, he hid a shapeshifting lady. She gives him an ancient relic of her dying peoples and tells him to keep it safe and find her grandson so he can have it. He makes a promise and since he’s Lago, he intends to keep it. This basically kicks off the rest of the story which skips forward 7 years in time to when he’s in his 20s and not a young kid anymore.
The world building in this is super intense. It’s one of the most built up worlds I’ve read about in a long time. It’s also one of the more unique in that there’s science woven throughout. I was listening to the audiobook and all the sudden I hear the word nematode and I snapped to attention since that’s a very specific kind of animal that’s not referenced often. I do like the combination of fantasy and scifi and there’s a good blend of both here that I really liked. However, there’s a number of info dumping passages in the form of teacher/student relationships after Lago flees his hometown and stumbles upon magic. Lago has led a sheltered life and basically needs everything explained to him which is not my favorite kind of world building, but at least it makes sense in context. That said, we also get a ton of world building through more natural means with more showing instead of telling. I certainly like the world building at times, it’s just the info dumping got to be a little much for me at points. There’s a deep lore about the planets, the gods, the histories of all the various cultures and humanoid-species and we get to know a lot about all of it. There was so much to take in I know I didn’t get it all on the first go around — for people who like to know every detail of a world and likes to re-read for details this could be up your alley.
I’m not sure how many kinds of penises I was expecting in this book, but there was a fair amount more than that. I guess because the opening felt like a young adult coming of age story I was expecting perhaps something more on the PG side of things, but we skipped ahead into the characters 20s and he is very much so an adult that enjoys adult things that include the touching of many penises. I’m not throwing shade, this is a personal thing, but sex scenes in a book don’t do it for me. Straight, gay, lesbian, orgies, I just don’t respond to sex in written form, even when performed on audiobooks, and as I’m starting to understand myself more I’m starting to blame that on the fact that I’m demisexual (emotional attraction required for physical attraction). There was a decent amount of sex in this book and so I just kind of found myself zoning out, personally. However, for people looking for a gay main character with an active sex life and on the furry side of things, this could be for you.
The pacing for me was a little all over the place. I’d get really into what I considered the main story line of lets go find this dude, return the mask, and avoid being captured by the scary soldier lady, but I felt things meandered a little too long at points in between big plot reveals or moments of tension. I like having fully developed characters and the time spent doing that, but I also started to lose my attention a little bit as I waited to see what happened next with the bigger overall plot.
Overall, I think I was slightly outside the target audience, but I enjoyed my time with this and would recommend it to people looking for a going-on-a-quest storyline with a gay main character and a moderate amount of steam.
The final score will come when Kristen finishes 😀 She be finished!
SPFBO SCORE:
- Kristen’s score 6.5/10
- Esme’s score: 6.25/10
- EXACT SCORE: 6.375