The title is a ginormous spoiler

[bloodygranuaile]

I'm so glad I'm in the BSpec book club; sometimes it seems like the only thing keeping me reading any SF/F at all. This time around, we read Kristen Ciccarelli's The Last Namsara, a debut fantasy novel from last year about a teenage princess who, for her crimes, has become her country's greatest dragon-hunter in atonement. 

 

This was an excellent read for me to indulge in around Christmas, since it is the season for comfort food, and this book is very much in the mold of things that are comfort reading for me -- an action-adventurey heroine, dragons, stories being Very Important, eradicating a great social injustice (in this case, slavery, which is bad, if you didn't know), all that fun stuff. Onto this mix of Things That Are Catnip To Me When I Am Tired And Seasonally Depressive, basically the make-or-break criterion is going to be whether the plot is sufficiently complex for me not to guess the twist a hundred pages out, and in this case, I didn't (not that I was trying too hard). So, with the conspiracy sufficiently conspiratorial, I was perfectly happy to indulge some of the more common goofy fantasy tropes -- names with too many Ks in them, a heavily telegraphed romance bumping up against the heroine's obligatory emotional underdevelopment, an arranged marriage of fantastically unsubtle terribleness. Also the book uses the term "soldat" instead of "soldier" for world-buildy flavor and it threw me off because "soldat" is French and the kingdom in this book is otherwise vaguely Middle Eastern-flavored, but perhaps that's on me for being a language nerd. Or perhaps it does make sense and is actually very deep because the French colonized North Africa and the protagonist's father's regime is bent on eradicating the "old ways" and subjugating the populace in the surrounding countryside. I don't know. 

 

Overall, I think we'll find stuff to discuss even if right now all I've got is "I liked it, it has dragons and stories."