Guerric Haché reviewed Broken Third by Guerric Haché
Review of 'Broken Third' on 'Goodreads'
As the author, I won't rate this!
But writing it has been both fun and challenging in whole new ways for this series. In a lot of ways this is a fish-out-of-water story, though given that we're dealing with Ada Liu, it might be more accurate to describe this as shark-out-of-water. This makes for a lot of fun situations, and some gags that I hope are just cheesy enough.
This book is also where the series starts to deploy its end-game, both in terms of plot and in terms of the supernatural elements that will be brought to bear on the finale. And it's the book in the series that will lean most heavily on space opera as a genre, and I do love me some space opera. All of this - the familiar magic, the weird new magic, the starships and space battles, the silly jokes and gags - …
As the author, I won't rate this!
But writing it has been both fun and challenging in whole new ways for this series. In a lot of ways this is a fish-out-of-water story, though given that we're dealing with Ada Liu, it might be more accurate to describe this as shark-out-of-water. This makes for a lot of fun situations, and some gags that I hope are just cheesy enough.
This book is also where the series starts to deploy its end-game, both in terms of plot and in terms of the supernatural elements that will be brought to bear on the finale. And it's the book in the series that will lean most heavily on space opera as a genre, and I do love me some space opera. All of this - the familiar magic, the weird new magic, the starships and space battles, the silly jokes and gags - are fun things to play with as a writer.
But it's been a challenge to find the balance between Ada's utter lack of concern for most things that don't personally affect her, and her need to engage with this new world and grow as a result of the things she experiences. Having people from an utterly different culture to call her out on her issues has been helpful to me and to her, but even as she grows she will always remain Ada, dangerous and difficult to work with.
It's also been an even greater challenge to use her alien perspective to portray a world that is both very much more like our own and different in a few critical ways that Ada herself doesn't notice at all. There's a lot of worldbuilding going on here - maybe too much, I worry - and that process is complicated by the fact that Ada is essentially, as one new character says, a wrecking ball.
The last big challenge here - or rather, not here - was Isavel. I wrote this book and its Isavel-centric sequel (which runs chronologically parallel to this) at the same time, but re-reading this alone I do miss having her around.
But don't worry. Isavel is very busy, doing some rather unbelievable things.