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fffriday2020-01-03 07:29 pm
el_staplador) wrote in fffriday2020-01-03 07:29 pm
Three Friday freebies
Actually, two and a half. Nitpicky reviews follow:
Outlaw was a free download from Niamh Murphy's site (which currently isn't loading for me). It's a retelling of the Robin Hood legend with a female Robin. Or, this case, Robyn. I could just about buy the idea of 'Robyn of Loxley' being an example of the Tiffany Problem, medieval spelling and all that, but I think I'd have preferred 'Roberta' or something. However, this was only one of a number of details that felt off - others included inappropriate use and conjugation of the second person singular, along with some questionable accent/dialect choices, and the statement that Robyn had fasted on saints' days - all of which threw me out of the action from time to time.
The action establishes the outlaw set-up and introduces Robyn, Marian, and Little John. It's very much the first in a series, and the f/f content is very slight - no doubt there'll be more in later books.
The Midnight Couch by Jae was another free download. This was a pretty straightforward contemporary story, in which the protagonist is a radio technician with a crush on the station's resident agony aunt. Fairly predictable, but none the less sweet.
DNF The Girl With Two Hearts (T. T. Thomas), which I think was going to be a historical fantasy. I find that the author did do the research as far as royal use of Gosport went, but the dialogue was very clunky and unconvincing, there was only the haziest idea of even fin-de-siècle mores (I can believe the heroine wears make-up by way of a disguise - I can't believe her sister approves of it and then introduces her to their brother as a 'theatre friend'!), and I gave up when the Victorian motorcycle gang showed up.
Outlaw was a free download from Niamh Murphy's site (which currently isn't loading for me). It's a retelling of the Robin Hood legend with a female Robin. Or, this case, Robyn. I could just about buy the idea of 'Robyn of Loxley' being an example of the Tiffany Problem, medieval spelling and all that, but I think I'd have preferred 'Roberta' or something. However, this was only one of a number of details that felt off - others included inappropriate use and conjugation of the second person singular, along with some questionable accent/dialect choices, and the statement that Robyn had fasted on saints' days - all of which threw me out of the action from time to time.
The action establishes the outlaw set-up and introduces Robyn, Marian, and Little John. It's very much the first in a series, and the f/f content is very slight - no doubt there'll be more in later books.
The Midnight Couch by Jae was another free download. This was a pretty straightforward contemporary story, in which the protagonist is a radio technician with a crush on the station's resident agony aunt. Fairly predictable, but none the less sweet.
DNF The Girl With Two Hearts (T. T. Thomas), which I think was going to be a historical fantasy. I find that the author did do the research as far as royal use of Gosport went, but the dialogue was very clunky and unconvincing, there was only the haziest idea of even fin-de-siècle mores (I can believe the heroine wears make-up by way of a disguise - I can't believe her sister approves of it and then introduces her to their brother as a 'theatre friend'!), and I gave up when the Victorian motorcycle gang showed up.
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Or better yet, Victorian bicycle gangs.
I went and read the book description on Amazon out of morbid curiosity, noted the reference to the heroine becoming a motorcycle courier during the Second Boer War, went to Google to find out how historically plausible that is (LOLNOPE) but discovered they had something even better: war bicyclists! Including 8-man bikes with GUNS.
Why on earth would you give your heroine an anachronistic motorcycle when you could have given her a BATTLE BIKE?!!