A review by wandering_not_lost
The Last Girl Scout by Natalie Ironside

adventurous dark hopeful medium-paced
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

Please mind the content warnings (mine and others') on this book:  it's trauma-ful in many ways.

A solid 4, but definitely not a 5 for me.  The book is great and recommended just as a breath of fresh air:  it's unrepentantly queer, unrepentantly trans-centered, and unrepentantly communist, and that is not something we see at all anywhere else.  The book itself is heavier on characters and worldbuilding and catharsis than it is on plot, really.  The first half of the book is ostensibly a heist, introducing the world and characters, generating a problem, gathering a group to go deal with the problem, and then (very, kind of improbably simply) dealing with the problem.  The second half of the book is basically a different novella dealing with a larger set of problems that come after the first half, and again it spends a lot of time worldbuilding and reuniting characters (there is a lot of space devoted to going to, negotiating at, and speaking to a communist General Assembly, for instance) and spends a relatively short amount of time dealing with the actual war toward the end.  

The one star comes off because some of the plot-liteness did leave the book feeling (for all its length and charm and gritty details) kind of light-weight.  The tension is built up but then dealt with relatively quickly
either by them finding an ally who can basically lead them right where they need to go in the Citadel, or by the war being prosecuted by a dumbass enemy general, or by everything falling just right in their kind of sketchy plan of "chaos up the Blacklanders so they fall apart from within"
.  Also, the characters' conversations often seemed to drag on.  I lost count of how many times, on-page, Jules had to tell her terrible backstory in roughly the same way, over and over, to different people, just because the author didn't seem to want to cut away or summarize.  The book also suffered a tad from everyone on the good side talking like therapists and being excruciatingly respectful of each other in exactly the same way throughout - it's nice wish-fulfillment to see someone accepted, despite their terrible backstory, over and over, but from a reader standpoint, it just felt repetitive.  Also, just as in many other books, I felt like it was really either dumb or improbable how the characters fell in love/in bed with someone they'd met like that day.  But, that's me.  There's also the usual editing fails of typos and characters occasionally saying the same thing in rapid succession, but eh, I didn't mind that much:  this is a massive book to publish yourself.

These are all obviously stylistic decisions, where the author was doing what they wanted with the book and nothing more, and I can respect that.
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