Space Opera

I feel bad abandoning this one, since I'm a fan of Cat Valente's work. Still, it was due back to the library, I have other books I need to get to, and was starting to feel like a slog.

Maybe I'll come back to it again some time in the future, give it another shot and see if it was just matter of my mood, of bad timing or some other ephemeral factor.

Strangely, I'd finished Valente's The Glass Town Game perhaps 2 or 3 weeks before this one. That one, a sort of Wizard of Oz by way of the Brontës, was delightful. So, I was expecting this one to be equally brilliant

I think it's really hard to pull off a work like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which Space Opera is aiming for. I figured Valente, a wonderfully talented writer, could have pulled it off. For lack of a better word, this just felt excessively twee, missing some element to ground it and make the jokes really pop.

Though Space Opera is better written, it reminded me of The Eyre Affair, another HGTTG-influenced work which didn't really work for me.

No star rating since I didn't finish, but the part I got through would probably be a 2.5 stars. I'm hoping I get a chance to revisit it and find I was wrong.