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cozyhades's review
3.0
Disclaimer: This review is rounded up to 3 but if I could do partial stars, it'd get a 2.5.
But regardless of the rating I gave, this is not a bad book for a casual reader looking for a fast paced queer POC romance in a dystopian world where Corporations are the enemy with an awesome diverse cast.
Pros:
- The world-building was so friggin' good!
If I were rating this book on world building alone, I'd give it a 4/5, possibly higher because it's just that amazing. The political dynamics, the technology, the terminology and slang were so good. Just flawless.
- Character interactions!
The snark! The sass! Part of what kept me reading (besides the world-building) was how the characters feared and hoped and loved and lived while insulting the living shite out of each other. Which brings us to the next point:
- The side characters!
Rami, Cherry, Jacobo, I loved them all. Each was uniquely crafted and developed and it was an absolute delight getting to know them. Rami easily stole the show, but I had a soft spot for Morgan. Oh Morgan...
- Plot
The storyline is awesome with some cool plot twists. It just gets buried under other stuff at times, is all.
- Dragons!!!!!!
Don't ask me how dragons ended up in a cyberpunk dystopia but they do. I love dragons.
Cons:
- Hate sex
There is sex without any buildup beyond "she's hot, I'm horny, and we're fighting" under unhealthy circumstances...which may have been the point! But I don't think it furthered the narrative or any character building. Also hate sex/angry sex really isn't my thing but to each their own.
- The main romance
Going from "tolerable acquaintances and hatesex" to "tentative romance blossoming" in about 27 pages of non-relationship building content didn't feel...great. I'm a sucker for the enemies to lovers trope but this time, felt rushed and abrupt.
- The main character interactions.
Separately, Sasha and Elena are great. Together, not so much. Or so it was in Part I. In Part II they didn't feel like the same characters as in Part I. Maybe it was the POV switch, maybe I'm just exhausted and brain dead, but that's how I remember it.
- A POV switch that somehow transformed
Tl;dr?
The world Rae D. Magdon created is one full of life, strife, and potential with a healthy dose of "fuck corporations", but the story she chose to tell wasn't my cup of tea. She has some great plot twists and clearly knows how to handle a large cast. I look forward to reading her future works!
Read time: 2 hours, 40 min
But regardless of the rating I gave, this is not a bad book for a casual reader looking for a fast paced queer POC romance in a dystopian world where Corporations are the enemy with an awesome diverse cast.
Pros:
- The world-building was so friggin' good!
If I were rating this book on world building alone, I'd give it a 4/5, possibly higher because it's just that amazing. The political dynamics, the technology, the terminology and slang were so good. Just flawless.
- Character interactions!
The snark! The sass! Part of what kept me reading (besides the world-building) was how the characters feared and hoped and loved and lived while insulting the living shite out of each other. Which brings us to the next point:
- The side characters!
Rami, Cherry, Jacobo, I loved them all. Each was uniquely crafted and developed and it was an absolute delight getting to know them. Rami easily stole the show, but I had a soft spot for Morgan. Oh Morgan...
Spoiler
what a wonderful villain.- Plot
The storyline is awesome with some cool plot twists. It just gets buried under other stuff at times, is all.
- Dragons!!!!!!
Don't ask me how dragons ended up in a cyberpunk dystopia but they do. I love dragons.
Cons:
- Hate sex
There is sex without any buildup beyond "she's hot, I'm horny, and we're fighting" under unhealthy circumstances...which may have been the point! But I don't think it furthered the narrative or any character building. Also hate sex/angry sex really isn't my thing but to each their own.
- The main romance
Going from "tolerable acquaintances and hatesex" to "tentative romance blossoming" in about 27 pages of non-relationship building content didn't feel...great. I'm a sucker for the enemies to lovers trope but this time, felt rushed and abrupt.
- The main character interactions.
Separately, Sasha and Elena are great. Together, not so much. Or so it was in Part I. In Part II they didn't feel like the same characters as in Part I. Maybe it was the POV switch, maybe I'm just exhausted and brain dead, but that's how I remember it.
- A POV switch that somehow transformed
Spoiler
Sasha into an actual human (debatable) with feelings instead of a cold brokenhearted butthead.Tl;dr?
The world Rae D. Magdon created is one full of life, strife, and potential with a healthy dose of "fuck corporations", but the story she chose to tell wasn't my cup of tea. She has some great plot twists and clearly knows how to handle a large cast. I look forward to reading her future works!
Read time: 2 hours, 40 min
jathura's review
5.0
Incredible cyberpunk setting that enabled the story to be so full of action but without it feeling overwhelming. But every moment of downtime was fully utilised to make the most of the ensemble cast.
Speaking of which they were delightfully diverse and really well executed, thanks were given to a large group of sensitivity readers in the foreward and I think it shows. I especially appreciated the exploration of Sasha's gender.
Really well done book and I'm probably going to be chasing down other cyberpunk wlw books to try experience the high of reading this book again.
Speaking of which they were delightfully diverse and really well executed, thanks were given to a large group of sensitivity readers in the foreward and I think it shows. I especially appreciated the exploration of Sasha's gender.
Really well done book and I'm probably going to be chasing down other cyberpunk wlw books to try experience the high of reading this book again.
kassogtha's review
adventurous
emotional
funny
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
rogue_lurker's review
5.0
What a wild ride! I really really enjoyed this one - it grabbed me from the first page and didn't let up until the very end.
Lucky 7 is a cyber-punk action-palooza that features a diverse and engaging crew of misfits. Elena and Sasha are the protaganists - the jacker (hacker/cyber expert) and handler (leader/brains) of a crew that hires out for less than legal ops. The rest of the team is rounded out by Cherry, the wrench (engineer/explosives), who is kinda crazy and loves to blow shit up and her partner Rami, the cloak, who is a non-binary person that specializes in infiltration/disguise who is harder to get a read on as they change identities so often. There's also Doc and Rock, the MO (Medic) and grunt (just what it sounds like - the muscle). Doc is a brilliant kid, but seems to have absolutely no innocence and her brother, Rock, is a mountain of a man who has been modified to the point of being mostly cyborg. Finally there's Val - the AI who monitors and observes the team.
I appreciate that the world building isn't done through exposition - Magdon just dumps you in the middle of seedy bar and you figure things out as you follow Elena -it's not hard to catch on and it also forces you to focus on Elena and the wild-assed action rather than taking a breath and reading paragraphs of internal monologue. There's terminology and idioms you may not recognize at first, but based on the context you pick it up pretty fast and next thing you know, they are part of your lexicon.
Elena, a jacker on the run after her crew is killed during a ops that went bad, joins a new crew (the Lucky 7) who have the common goal of avoiding the hit squads being sent out by the evil corporation. The first half of the book is first person from Elena's POV and she's full of snark and sass , and the action literally never really stops as she and Sasha gather the rest of the crew. There's a great twist halfway through and the first person narration switches to Sasha, the handler (leader/brains) of the Lucky 7. Things slow down a bit and get a bit more introspective, but then the team is off another gonzo ops which leads to more action packed scenes. I loved Elena so much I was a bit disappointed to have the POV change - she seemed flat once she wasn't the narrator - and the perception of Elena, Sasha and the rest of the team changed as we see them through Sasha's eyes. In retrospect, if Magdon had kept up the level of action in the first half, I probably would have eventually been overwhelmed.
There is an element of romance between Elena and Sasha - this is definitely an opposites attract kind of relationship with a rather intense chemistry that leads to one of the longest sex scenes I've come across (Sasha's like the energizer bunny thanks to all her cyber mods). The romance isn't the strongest part of the story, but it fits in and by the time we move to Sasha's POV it fits into the larger story and character arcs.
Definitely recommended for a rip-roaring good time.
Lucky 7 is a cyber-punk action-palooza that features a diverse and engaging crew of misfits. Elena and Sasha are the protaganists - the jacker (hacker/cyber expert) and handler (leader/brains) of a crew that hires out for less than legal ops. The rest of the team is rounded out by Cherry, the wrench (engineer/explosives), who is kinda crazy and loves to blow shit up and her partner Rami, the cloak, who is a non-binary person that specializes in infiltration/disguise who is harder to get a read on as they change identities so often. There's also Doc and Rock, the MO (Medic) and grunt (just what it sounds like - the muscle). Doc is a brilliant kid, but seems to have absolutely no innocence and her brother, Rock, is a mountain of a man who has been modified to the point of being mostly cyborg. Finally there's Val - the AI who monitors and observes the team.
I appreciate that the world building isn't done through exposition - Magdon just dumps you in the middle of seedy bar and you figure things out as you follow Elena -it's not hard to catch on and it also forces you to focus on Elena and the wild-assed action rather than taking a breath and reading paragraphs of internal monologue. There's terminology and idioms you may not recognize at first, but based on the context you pick it up pretty fast and next thing you know, they are part of your lexicon.
Elena, a jacker on the run after her crew is killed during a ops that went bad, joins a new crew (the Lucky 7) who have the common goal of avoiding the hit squads being sent out by the evil corporation. The first half of the book is first person from Elena's POV and she's full of snark and sass , and the action literally never really stops as she and Sasha gather the rest of the crew. There's a great twist halfway through and the first person narration switches to Sasha, the handler (leader/brains) of the Lucky 7. Things slow down a bit and get a bit more introspective, but then the team is off another gonzo ops which leads to more action packed scenes. I loved Elena so much I was a bit disappointed to have the POV change - she seemed flat once she wasn't the narrator - and the perception of Elena, Sasha and the rest of the team changed as we see them through Sasha's eyes. In retrospect, if Magdon had kept up the level of action in the first half, I probably would have eventually been overwhelmed.
There is an element of romance between Elena and Sasha - this is definitely an opposites attract kind of relationship with a rather intense chemistry that leads to one of the longest sex scenes I've come across (Sasha's like the energizer bunny thanks to all her cyber mods). The romance isn't the strongest part of the story, but it fits in and by the time we move to Sasha's POV it fits into the larger story and character arcs.
Definitely recommended for a rip-roaring good time.
corrie's review
5.0
Wow! What an exciting read this was. Book Club Buddie D. and I were buckled in for a bumpy ride. I know that author Rae D. Magdon is a powerhouse who honed her sci-fi writing skills in many fan fic universes like Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The 100, Mass Effect: Andromeda to name a few. She knows her stuff and it really shows!
It made reading Lucky 7 a wonderful experience. It was like watching a very well-choreographed sci-fi/cyberpunk adventure movie with a hefty dollop of hot sex. There is a wonderful diverse cast of unique characters you will come to love as family. Magdon has made sure to be super inclusive as far as gender- and ethnic diversity is concerned and her world building is phenomenal!
I loved it, D. loved it… just read it!
f/f explicit
Themes: I think this was my first experience with hate fucking, they made up later in the story don’t worry, big story, some nice twists, pathos plenty, you get your money's worth in the sexy-times department, their sessions can last like three chapters, these girls have some serious stamina!
5 stars
It made reading Lucky 7 a wonderful experience. It was like watching a very well-choreographed sci-fi/cyberpunk adventure movie with a hefty dollop of hot sex. There is a wonderful diverse cast of unique characters you will come to love as family. Magdon has made sure to be super inclusive as far as gender- and ethnic diversity is concerned and her world building is phenomenal!
I loved it, D. loved it… just read it!
f/f explicit
Themes: I think this was my first experience with hate fucking, they made up later in the story don’t worry, big story, some nice twists, pathos plenty, you get your money's worth in the sexy-times department, their sessions can last like three chapters, these girls have some serious stamina!
5 stars
abailey410's review
4.0
This book had a little bit of everything in it. It was fast-paced and highly entertaining. I enjoyed every word and would love to see more from this crew.
I loved the main character and Rae was able to write all of the characters with so much personality that they jumped off the page and it felt like you were a part of the crew on each op. Each character brought something different to the team and story. My favorite part was the budding relationship between Elena and Sasha. I recommend this story if you are in the mood for something completely different that is full of action, realistic relationships, and a huge amount of heart.
I loved the main character and Rae was able to write all of the characters with so much personality that they jumped off the page and it felt like you were a part of the crew on each op. Each character brought something different to the team and story. My favorite part was the budding relationship between Elena and Sasha. I recommend this story if you are in the mood for something completely different that is full of action, realistic relationships, and a huge amount of heart.
shema's review
5.0
This book is amazing! Not only does it feature a cast of queer characters, but also queer characters of color. And to top it all off, the story's pretty awesome. Lucky 7 explores a cyberpunk future taken over by a corportation with a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits working together to work against it. (Have I mentioned how much I'm a sucker for found families!) The two main characters also go through major development through their internal struggles and their relationship with each other. Classic Enemies to Lovers Trope. (But it's even better cause of queer ladies!)
I hope this becomes a series, because I'd really like to see more of the world and learn more about the side characters which I've come to love. In the meantime, I can't wait to read all of Rae D Magdon's books!
I hope this becomes a series, because I'd really like to see more of the world and learn more about the side characters which I've come to love. In the meantime, I can't wait to read all of Rae D Magdon's books!
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