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A review by myhandmadehell
Renegade Love by Ann Aguirre
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
I was honestly so sad to get to the end of this trilogy, because I have enjoyed the Galactic Love series so much! This was such a lovely way to wrap up these lightly interconnected stories, and it felt like the most ambitious story yet. Over three books, Aguirre managed to build and reveal an intergalactic universe full of fascinating races, planets and other sci fi locales, and political intrigue that really made the trilogy feel like it was larger than the sum of its parts.
This book had one of my favorite plots: a heist! I LOVE a heist. Yara Duncan is a fast-talking high-charisma human who’s been out in the galaxy for a while now after getting accidentally scooped up during an alien cattle raid. After a rocky start, she eventually found some relative comfort and safety as a feature exhibit in a traveling “freak show” style circus - yes she is the very same human our Tiralans visited in the second book! - and has been sitting relatively pretty with an easy gig that’s let her see the universe. Even better, on earth she was a science fiction fan, so she has a bit of tongue-in-cheek genre savvy that was really fun.
Toth Krag, the bounty hunter from book 2, is tired of being a bounty hunter, for many well-explained reasons, and is desperate to shake off the armor that identifies him everywhere he goes as the most dangerous person in the galaxy. Yara is the first of his targets to actually…treat him like a person. Which is, apparently, all this sad boy needs to decide to do what he always had the power to do.
Like any good heist story, they pull together a rag-tag group of criminals and activists to clear their respective debts and earn a life of freedom to be exactly who they want to be.
My main criticisms are pretty light, honestly. At one point Yara’s mother, who disappeared when Yara was 15, shows up, and it’s kind of out of nowhere? There’s an interesting thread that gets mentioned about how they both managed to get “abducted” in the same way, but that story arc never really goes anywhere so the character being Yara’s mother doesn’t seem to play a significant role in the story. Also, I kind of felt like the romance was a bit one-sided. Krag seemed a lot more romantically interested in Yara than she was in him, and I’d have liked to see more emotional development between the two. It was challenging to gauge the passage of time, as well, so this book might have taken place over a few days or several weeks. But honestly, the actual heist plot was so fun and compelling that I didn’t really care if other areas weren’t explored as much.
Desperately looking forward to exploring the rest of Ann Aguirre’s catalog!
This book had one of my favorite plots: a heist! I LOVE a heist. Yara Duncan is a fast-talking high-charisma human who’s been out in the galaxy for a while now after getting accidentally scooped up during an alien cattle raid. After a rocky start, she eventually found some relative comfort and safety as a feature exhibit in a traveling “freak show” style circus - yes she is the very same human our Tiralans visited in the second book! - and has been sitting relatively pretty with an easy gig that’s let her see the universe. Even better, on earth she was a science fiction fan, so she has a bit of tongue-in-cheek genre savvy that was really fun.
Toth Krag, the bounty hunter from book 2, is tired of being a bounty hunter, for many well-explained reasons, and is desperate to shake off the armor that identifies him everywhere he goes as the most dangerous person in the galaxy. Yara is the first of his targets to actually…treat him like a person. Which is, apparently, all this sad boy needs to decide to do what he always had the power to do.
Like any good heist story, they pull together a rag-tag group of criminals and activists to clear their respective debts and earn a life of freedom to be exactly who they want to be.
My main criticisms are pretty light, honestly. At one point Yara’s mother, who disappeared when Yara was 15, shows up, and it’s kind of out of nowhere? There’s an interesting thread that gets mentioned about how they both managed to get “abducted” in the same way, but that story arc never really goes anywhere so the character being Yara’s mother doesn’t seem to play a significant role in the story. Also, I kind of felt like the romance was a bit one-sided. Krag seemed a lot more romantically interested in Yara than she was in him, and I’d have liked to see more emotional development between the two. It was challenging to gauge the passage of time, as well, so this book might have taken place over a few days or several weeks. But honestly, the actual heist plot was so fun and compelling that I didn’t really care if other areas weren’t explored as much.
Desperately looking forward to exploring the rest of Ann Aguirre’s catalog!