A Fan's Playground

It's a Boys Own Adventure IN SPACE! It's.....not my usual kind of book. But it was kind of riveting? The characters are one-dimensional, the narrative is infodumpy, the plot is silly, but it was still a fun read. I'm probably gonna read the rest of the series. Or at least the next book.

(Thinking about it, it's kind of a parallel to Georgette Heyer's novels: equally shallow and variously problematic, but one very TRADITIONALLY MASCULINE and the other very TRADITIONALLY FEMININE for the era in which these authors were writing. They're two sides of the same coin.)

The plot of David Starr, Space Ranger goes as follows. David Starr was orphaned at a young age, then raised by two close family friends he knows as uncles. David grows up to be JUST LIKE HIS FATHER except SMARTER. David's sent off by his uncles (who have high political positions) on a mission to Mars to discover the cause of MYSTERIOUS POISONINGS occurring throughout the solar system!

David is MACHO and CLEVER and immediately manages to get himself an undercover position as a farmboy ( and I guess the rest of this is spoilers? )

OH DUDE this is one of those books where the pov character is not the main character, which means that the pov character spends like ALL HIS TIME paying unreasonable quantities of attention to the wonderfulness of the main character and it is BEAUTIFUL. I love it. And of course I totally ship Hornblower/Bush (mc/pov) because I mean really.

And okay but I actually really love seeing Hornblower from an outside pov, after spending last book in his poor anxious head. He's so INTERESTING from the outside, especially when you know about all his insecurities from the earlier book. Though on the other hand this book is basically an ode to how Hornblower is the only truly capable person in the world and it's kind of hilarious.

So I reread Voyage of the Dawntreader over the last couple days, in response to seeing the movie. ( Spoilers for the book and the film. )