Reviews

"You Sexy Thing" is an entertaining space opera with some fantasy elements, starring a quirky assortment of likable characters, most of them ex-military. The book opens with the group running a restaurant, and progresses through mayhem that includes pirates and a sentient spaceship. N.B. The eponymous spaceship is my favorite character: I have a very soft spot for sentient ships.

The science fictional and fantastical elements -- not least the variety of aliens -- are inventive. The characters pleased me. The interactions between the characters pleased me. But while I enjoyed this, I didn't enjoy it as wholeheartedly as the spacefaring found-family ingredients led me to expect. This may be because the use of omniscient point-of-view felt uneven to me, with occasional lengthy stretches from a single character's perspective before it resumed dipping in and out of different characters' viewpoints.

I also missed scene breaks. Even when there was a break in the action, plus a change in location, plus a jump forward in time, plus a switch in the focal character, the prose proceeded without the comfort of blank lines. (I noticed only two scene breaks, one in chapter 5, one in chapter 23, though there might have been others I missed.)

One very nitpicky nitpick: at the start of chapter 21, Niko, the character in command, assigns the pairings in which they will head out, but omits to mention one of the characters (Lassite), in a way that felt like a mistake.

One highlight: I especially liked a scene in chapter 16 with Lassite and several ghosts. Partly because of that scene, Lassite is probably my second-favorite character. (My favorite is unquestionably the spaceship.)

Last but not least, the book gets darker than I was in the mood for.

Spoiler

For about a quarter of the page count, the group is held captive by a sadistic pirate. And bad things happen. In another mood, I would probably have weathered this just fine, but here and now, in May 2022, it wasn't what I wanted.

Three out of five provisional stars, with a note that it might have been a four-star read for me at another time.

About my reviews: I try to review every book I read, including those that I don't end up enjoying. The reviews are not scholarly, but just indicate my reaction as a reader, reading being my addiction. I am miserly with 5-star reviews; 4 stars means I liked a book very much; 3 stars means I liked it; 2 stars means I didn't like it (though often the 2-star books are very popular with other readers and/or are by authors whose other work I've loved).