#yes i am referencing a 5 year old video its a classic

[finnunu]

Friendly reminder to make sure your dad legally changes his name to Cherry Pie so you'll be able to get a visit from Gigi the Christmas Snake!

[cromulentbookreview]

Weaponized Jaws

Or: Seafire by Natalie C. Parker!

Action on the seas featuring badass female protagonists? Yeah, I’m definitely going to read that. Very little needed in the way of convincing me to read this book.

Seafire had been advertised before as Fury Road meets Wonder Woman meets the ocean, which makes sense. Though with much less Wonder Woman and way more of Kevin Costner's Waterworld.

Alright, children, gather around while I explain to you what Waterworld was.

Yeah, Waterworld. Not a video game, it was a movie starring Kevin Costner, the world’s only American-accented Robin Hood (hey, I like that movie, Alan Rickman was a treasure and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise). Waterworld came out in 1995 and was massive flop, now a bit of a cult-classic. I remember 1995, somewhat vaguely. God I’m an Old now, aren’t I?

I’ll never be as cool as Steve Buscemi, though.

For those of you who enjoy both Fury Road and Waterworld, then you’ll definitely like Seafire. I love anything that takes place on the ocean - a side effect of my strange Dudes on Boats fixation that I’ve mentioned previously (my apologies to For a Muse of Fire, . Sea stories are kind of my thing. So is post-apocalyptic YA fiction. So this book ticked all the “I need entertainment and want to forget the news exists right now” boxes and worked out perfectly.

Caledonia Styx lives in Crapsack Waterworld, a post-apocalyptic flooded version of our world (referenced occasionally as the “old world”, flooded/destroyed as a result of some unknown calamity). Caledonia has the misfortune to live in an area controlled by Aric Athair, a vicious warlord and sir-not-appearing-in-this-book (since Seafire is the first in a planned trilogy, I’m sure we’ll meet him eventually). Anyway, Athair controls his war boys, called Bullets, by drugging them with something called Silt, made from some sort of weird hybrid poppy-flower-thing. Life in Athair’s territory sucks, so Caledonia’s mom, Rhona, and a bunch of other families have gotten together on the Styx family’s ship, the Ghost, to break through Athair’s blockade and head off to freedom elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the night the Ghost intends to escape, Caledonia and her best friend Pisces (they’re really big on the names from Greco Roman mythology in crapsack Waterworld) are sent ashore to gather some last minute supplies. Caledonia comes across a bullet called Lir, who asks for her help. It’s all bullshit, though - the second Caledonia gives away the location of the Ghost, Lir and his fellow bullets attack, slaughtering Caledonia and Pisces’s families and sinking the Ghost.

Pisces didn’t witness Lir’s treachery, though, and Caledonia, feeling responsible for the deaths of all those onboard the Ghost, keeps that bit where she gave away the position of the ship to herself. That makes sense, considering how guilty it feels, but later, as Caledonia refers to Pisces as her “sister”, the fact that she kept this bit of intel under wraps does become a tad annoying. Especially when Caledonia refuses, multiple times, to clarify why it is she does’t trust Bullets. She’s just like “nope, can’t trust Bullets” instead of “no, that one time I trusted a Bullet, he slaughtered our families.”

Anyway!

Four years after the deaths of their families, Caledonia and Pisces have raised and repaired the Ghost, renaming it the Mors Navis.

(Language nerd sidebar: Mors Navis, by the way, is Latin for Death Ship. Thank you Google translate! No thanks to my 10+ years of German education. Why couldn’t I have picked a Latin language? Noo, I had to go with the Germanics. Mors Navis does sound way more menacing than Totenschiff. Eat it, B. Traven).

Over those four years, Caledonia, acting as captain, and Pisces, her first mate, have collected a crew composed entirely of girls and women, all of whom have no love for Aric Athair and his Bullet army. Caledonia and her crew basically go around the Bullet seas, making life hell for Athair’s people. During one such mission, Pisces is wounded and then captured, only to be rescued and returned to the Mors Navis by a Bullet who claims he wants to escape. Caledonia, who has literally zero reasons to trust Bullets, doesn’t trust him. Pisces points out, reasonably, that he saved her life when he could have left her to die. But Caledonia simply repeats her mantra of “no trusting Bullets” while refusing to elaborate.

Until the Bullet lets it slip that Donnally and Ares, Caledonia and Pisces’s brothers, respectively, survived the massacre on board the Ghost and were pressed into Athair’s drug-addled Bullet army. He knows what ship Donnally and Ares are on, and the route it takes to bring in conscripts (read: children stolen from their families, drugged, and forced into Athair’s army, refusal to comply met with extreme violence, in the usual fashion of a murderous tyrant).

Suddenly, Caledonia has reason to question her strict “don’t trust Bullets” policy. But it’s one of those Meek’s Cutoff situations: the Bullet could be a lying sack of shit and leading the Mors Navis into a trap. Or he could be telling the truth, leading Caledonia and Pisces to their long-lost brothers. What to do?

Well, it’d be a pretty short book if they just shot the Bullet, dumped his body in the ocean and moved on, wouldn’t it?

It took me a little longer to read Seafire than I intended - I’m a slow reader anyway, but while I was reading Seafire, I was also binging on Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard series (which are fantastic by the way - highly recommend the audiobooks, Michael Page is an amazing audiobook narrator) so my focus may have been just a wee bit divided. My biggest complaint is now we have yet another seafaring heroine with red hair. How come all the seafaring heroines have to have red hair? Also, it’s funny you should bring up red hair, because in the world of the Gentleman Bastards, bad things happen to girls with red hair. Seriously, how come all the fiery heroine types have to have red hair? I mean, it’s not like I’m jealous or anything. I mean, it’s not like I should have been born with red hair, but no, it ended up a dull, boring blonde, and hair dye is expensive and smells terrible...

Uhm.

I mean.

Seriously, though, red hair is a rare thing - if Caledonia’s father had dark hair and her mother had red hair, the most likely outcome would be a bunch of kids with...dark hair. Though if her father did have a recessive red-hair gene, then it’s entirely possible for him to have produced red-headed children... So I guess it’s possible. 

Not that I’m annoyed that my hair didn’t turn out red. Even though it should have, goddamn it! I know those recessive genes are in there somewhere!

Stupid lousy blonde hair grumble grumble grumble...

Ok, back to Seafire - it is definitely a highly enjoyable book, lots of nonstop action, but not a lot of resolution because it’s the first in an intended series. I highly recommend breezing through the book in one go, rather than endlessly picking it up and then putting it down in order to find out whether or not Locke and Jean finally kiss (they don’t). 

But yes, jealousy over fictional characters’ red hair aside, the only major complaint I have about Seafire rests with a single line. The thing about reading ARCs, which I think I’ve mentioned before but, again, nobody reads these, so I might as well: ARCs are not finished copies. The final copy of Seafire might not even feature this line, so it seems silly to complain about it, but complaining is fun so I’ll do it anyway.

So the secondary-boss villain, Lir, Caledonia’s sworn enemy as he killed her whole goddamn family, is described as having a “long face with a jaw that looked sharp enough to be a weapon of its own.”

From that line onward I found I was unable to focus on anything except how a man’s jaw could be sharp enough to constitute a weapon. It’s a question that’s been driving me to distraction for weeks now. Is Lir’s jawline sharp enough that it comes to a point, like a knife? What would that look like on a three-dimensional human person? How would one wield their weaponized jaws? Like a battering ram? Or would you just like, wave your head around like a sword? Does this mean his chin comes to a point, too? That one line of the galley proof of Seafire has caused me more consternation than anything else in the book - and this is a book that features lots of violence. Lots and lots of it. And here I am contemplating a man with a weaponized jawbone. 

I mean, of the whole book it’s one line and it doesn’t even matter but...but...gah, I can’t help but picture a guy with knives for a jaw. 

RECOMMENDED FOR: Fans of badass female protagonists kicking ass on the high seas, fans of YA lit who also happen to be fans of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone who takes physical descriptions of fictional far too literally.

RELEASE DATE: August 28, 2018

RATING: 4/5

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR SEQUEL: Lhotse

OBLIGATORY STYX REFERENCE: