Review - Tropical Punch by S.C. Jensen (Bubbles In Space #1)
Preamble
I ‘met’ S.C. Jensen in one of my FB author groups, this one focused on Funny Indie Authors (the name of the group, incidentally). I am a big fan of reading funny stuff, saw she was advertising this one, liked the cover, and so I decided to give her first-in-series a whirl. Extra points when I found out it was inspired by old school detective fiction.
A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. It’s either five stars or nothing these days – if I don’t like it, no review. Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.
Take from that what you will.
Review – 5/5
If you’ve ever seen The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s wonderful sci-fi myth released a couple of years before The Matrix and one of my favourite movies from my childhood, you might remember Chris Tucker’s character, Ruby Rhod. I was under the impression that he was the most effeminate straight dude ever to grace sci-fi, a foil to Bruce Willis’ hyper-traditionally-masculine Korben Dallas. Rhod was so fabulous, so over-the-top, and yet he was getting adult with chicks constantly, like the super hot flight attendant on the space cruiser. I have to admit it was hard to make sense of to a kid growing up in a society where masculinity was defined by pretending like feelings don’t exist and dudes calling each other the other three letter f word like it was going out of style. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I realized masculinity itself was a far more hilarious butt of jokes. Come on, it was the nineties – name me a movie besides this one without at least one joke where the punchline is ‘ha! gay!’ and I’ll give you a stick of gum.
You might be wondering why I bring all of this up, and why I just mentioned gum. Well, the kick-ass gum-chewing heroine of the story is Betty ‘Bubbles’ Marlowe (yes, almost certainly after Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, private dick star in stories like The Big Sleep), and the new world champion of most effeminate straight sci-fi tritagonist goes to… Cosmo Régale, owner of Cosmo Cosmetics, dude whose description sounds just like Ruby Rhod, self-titled ‘Destroyer Of Masculine Paradigms,’ the guy who names a beauty product after Bubbles… namely, Bubbles In Space, the title of the series. This is after he hits on her and we’re told in no uncertain terms how much of a ladies’ man he is.
It's a funny book, but only every once in a while in a guffaw-y type of way. It’s more of the kind of book that puts a grin on your face. Jensen says in the afterword that she was heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which is a genre I got into after reading Stephen King’s On Writing, where he essentially recommends going through them to learn how to write descriptively. Probably because it’s so over the top. I’m not sure if you’ve ever read some of the similes in a detective novel, but they’re patently ridiculous at times, something that Jensen channels with hilarious grace. To wit, ‘Rays of intense sunlight beat down and burrowed into my exposed flesh like burning worms.’
Yep, that’s a legit line from the book.
Getting back to the whole masculinity thing, these old detective novels feel like you ate a carton of cigarettes and drank a 40-ounce bottle of cheap Scotch just by reading the pages. Bubbles throws that trope on its head by being a woman who is sober and is tempted by her old demon gin from time to time. She’s also super fab herself, not of the whole ‘I have five black suits in my wardrobe’ type of school as the PIs from the old stories. So much of the story is about fashion and glamour to go with the mystery that at times my eyes started to glaze over (I’m no Cosmo Régale in this sense, and only a Lothario in my dreams). But it’s also about kick-ass robot arms and sarcastic and touchy holographic pigs named Hammett after… well, I think you get it.
The mystery itself is pretty fun, though I have to admit I might have lost the plot. I didn’t really get what exactly happened, maybe 85% of it, though it didn’t really detract from my enjoyment at all, which is a strange thing to write. That’s probably my own issue though. These stories always have a kind of domino type of thing at the end, where all these plot threads come together and you realize ‘aha! aha! aha!’ like some kind of a twist hurricane. Near the eye of the storm, I was kind of like, ‘uh, wut?’
Maybe it was the language. You get absolutely dumped on with the slang, a bunch of words that we are left to figure out through context. Normally, I love this. It was a lot though, more than the ush, and I could see it turning someone off. There is a glossary at the end, which you get to read after you pretty much have the whole thing figured out (or maybe if you’re less of a knobhead than me, you press the Kindle’s Table Of Contents button and check it out first). The first half of the book had me feeling like a bit of a twit, but by the end of it I was like ‘oh yes, I know what you are saying,’ and not in a response to an idiomatic ‘knowmsayin’?’ type of way.
In any case, the book was fantabulous, totally extra, and very glitzy and glamorous. It was hilarious in its own way, and though Cosmo and Bubbles never hooked up (hey, it’s not that kind of book), the relationships between the characters were enjoyable. I loved Ham the holo-pig, clearly the scene-stealer whenever he showed up. He also managed to pull some cool stuff to upgrade Bubbles’ kit near the end, to make her near indestructible.
Oh yeah, there’s cyborg-on-robot violence, too, weren’t you paying attention?
Check it out on the ‘zon here.