Princess Holy Aura

This is a book for nerds, about nerds, and clearly written by an absolute nerd. To be clear, that's not a complaint: but it is something of warning. Princess Holy Aura is so thoroughly suffused with memes and allusions that a person without at least a requisite minimum of nerdiness would almost certainly enjoy it far less. At the very least, you should have seen a magical girl anime before and have at least a basic understanding of what tabletop RPGs even are.

The most important thing to understand about Princess Holy Aura is that it is not a comedy, or a parody, or a satire. The premise - anime-style magical girl sentai story set in the US, in which the protagonist begins as a burly 35-year-old man, everyone's genre-savvy, the monsters are (literally) Lovecraftian horrors, and everything is influenced by and filtered through memes - might sound risible, but there are serious themes at work here, and (critically) the 35-year-old-man-turns-into-14-year-old-girl thing is never once played for laughs: rather, it's used as a lens to examine identity, privilege, relative age, gender both as identity and as it is perceived by others, and the ethical consequences of the magical girl formula. (The latter is an important theme, but self-scrutinising magical girl shows aren't at all uncommon, so it's as much a part of the formula as it examines it. The identity themes are more unique to Princess Holy Aura.)

It's also important to note that this is not, in any way, a trans story. Stephen Russ begins as a cis man; when he becomes Princess Holy Aura, and then - as a secret identity - Holly Owen, she takes on not only the body but the entire identity of a teenaged cis girl. It is trans-adjacent, and trans readers may see something of themselves reflected in Holly's struggles to come to terms with her identity and later dysphoria as Steve, but readers who are drawn to it for these reasons should also be warned of occasional transmisic phrases: while some of the characters are clearly aware of trans people existing, they also clearly have never actually met one, and something along the lines of "a woman who doesn't want to be a woman" comes up in dialogue twice in the book.

These identity issues aren't just side-content, either. In many ways, they're the main conflict of the book: familiarity with magical girl shows in general leaves little doubt as to the team's eventual victory, but what will happen to Holly/Stephen when it's all over is a significant source of tension.

The anime vibe isn't just in the content and story: it carries over to the writing style, which has a distinctly cartoonish feeling to it at times. It's a very visuals-oriented book, to the point where it almost feels Ryk E. Spoor was transcribing an anime as it played in their head, and it makes very heavy use of italics. A bit too heavy, to my mind, and I say this as a person who tends towards overusing italics themself. If you're a person who a) enjoys anime and b) can visualise easily, this may be a point in its favour; if not, it's definitely a weakness. Many things which would look really cool on-screen don't carry over as well to text, and little use is made of the strengths inherent to prose.

In the end, it was a good book - better than I expected at first - and I'd gladly recommend it. (But only to nerds.)

Selling points: Stephen/Holly is a genuinely good person; all the nerdy references; strong focus on ethics; intelligent examination of identity, privilege, perspective, gender both felt and perceived, sacrifice &c.; fourteen-year-old girls beating the shit out of eldritch horrors; racial diversity; Sikh representation; sensible overturning of tropes.

Warnings: occasional casual transmisia; cartoonish writing style; lesser focus on psychological problems than was implied, esp. considering potentially traumatising situations and overall lack of neurodivergent and/or disabled representation; also this is clearly a book for nerds and if you're not nerdy enough you probably won't like it very much.