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F/F Friday: Sparks Fly
Aug. 7th, 2020 03:19 pmI loved Llinos Cathryn Thomas’s recent book f/f novella A Duet for Invisible Strings so much that I immediately bought her earlier book, Sparks Fly, an f/f novella about two women falling in love after they are assigned to work as co-principals of a school for Zero Gravity Artistic Display, in which performers fly pods in zero gravity conditions, shooting off sparks as their pods move in time.
The Zero Gravity Artistic Displays are delightful and I enjoyed every moment that the book spent exploring the art form - not just as art but also as a massive practical undertaking. (Those pods clearly don’t come cheap!) If anything, I wished the book had devoted even more time to this idea: it clearly could have been even more fleshed out.
In general, I felt the book needed to be more fleshed out - not just the worldbuilding but the reluctant-coprincipals-to-lovers arc between the protagonists. The absolute mastery of the emotional arc displayed in A Duet for Invisible Strings is not yet fully formed here, perhaps in part because the emotional arc the protagonists need to traverse is longer in this earlier book, while the book itself is shorter; it feels as if the story does not quite have space to breathe.
The pods are lots of fun, though. It is a fun book, just not quite as strong as A Duet for Invisible Strings.
The Zero Gravity Artistic Displays are delightful and I enjoyed every moment that the book spent exploring the art form - not just as art but also as a massive practical undertaking. (Those pods clearly don’t come cheap!) If anything, I wished the book had devoted even more time to this idea: it clearly could have been even more fleshed out.
In general, I felt the book needed to be more fleshed out - not just the worldbuilding but the reluctant-coprincipals-to-lovers arc between the protagonists. The absolute mastery of the emotional arc displayed in A Duet for Invisible Strings is not yet fully formed here, perhaps in part because the emotional arc the protagonists need to traverse is longer in this earlier book, while the book itself is shorter; it feels as if the story does not quite have space to breathe.
The pods are lots of fun, though. It is a fun book, just not quite as strong as A Duet for Invisible Strings.
