A review by nelsonminar
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

1.0

A rare one star review for a book I finished. But only struggled to the end after several days of hate-reading, trying to consume pages in hopes the story had some payoff I would enjoy. It did not.

My biggest complaint with this book is the writing style. The exhausting, overwrought writing style. If I may quote...

A ship that wishes to avoid the unpleasantness of the public wormhole system is required by corporate law and the desire for self-preservation to have a Keshet representative on board, as anyone else attempting to work the Box would find their molecules subjected to all manner of assault in defiance of time, logic, and propriety—for example, summarily rearranged to resemble a painting by Picasso after it has been shat out by a sexually frustrated emu and delivered to the doorstep of a wholly perplexed pre-asp Cleopatra.

It goes on like that for whole paragraphs, chapters. The author seems to be channeling Douglas Adams. Only distilled to a unpleasant thickness, a gooey viscous embellished prose. Like a sauce with too much guar gum.

The premise of the book was vaguely promising: a galactic scale Eurovision contest. Unfortunately the main Earth characters came off as completely tedious. And the aliens are mostly just decoration, not characters with their own stories.