“Another in the entry of Lady Comics Pete Wants To Love.
I didn’t love this. Although I don’t think it had anything to do with the lady aspects of it. The characters are adventurers, but some aren’t fond of spiders. It’s a nice mix of likes and dislikes and traditionally feminine and not. Although honestly, I have a hard time finding much about the characters that differentiates them. There’s the crazy impulsive one. And the rest are…kind of a collection of haircuts, to be a jerk about it. Nothing wrong with them, but why have like 4 characters if they’re all kinda the same?
That’s not a huge complaint, honestly, because a person could make the same complaint about a lot of super teams or comic book characters. I DID like that the Lumberjanes were doing stuff, going on Goonies-esque missions. Against everything I railed against in talking about Princeless, they almost do TOO MUCH.
Here’s the thing, reading this book, I felt like a 90 year old man watching Spongebob at 4.8x speed. Just a lot of, Wait, what? What’s going on? Are they still in the cave? Where’s the camp counselor lady? Is she still in a boat? How did this happen?
I don’t know if it’s just because I’m too old and the sort of language of some comics and shows has passed me by. I feel a little like this when I see Adventure Time here and there. Or, it might be that the storytelling is kinda choppy.
There’s a saying my writing teacher has about sheep going through gates. When you do something that’s too ambiguous in a story, the reader might assume something is happening, or she might assume something else. And soon enough, if you have enough open gates for readers to wander through, they’ve lost track of the story. Reader A walks through one gate, Reader B through another, and by the time you get to your big reveal you’ve got people all over the damn place.
I went through just about every gate on planet Earth with this one. I’m fine with phenomena being unexplained and not every super virus needs a vaccine or something. But I just need a little more telling me where the characters are in space, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and a little more of that business.
So again, hooray and super hooray for a book that has female characters in primary positions. And hey, this one actually WRITTEN by a lady, which is cool. But the confusing narrative just had me turning back and forth to figure out the basics.”