I got my Covid booster shot the other day and I'm all achy and crabby. Add to that a precarious balance on the edge of a reading slump. Desperate times call for desperate measures. When crabbiness and slumpiness attack at the same time, there are two alternatives: re-reading favourite books or reading books that I'm reasonably sure I won't love. Either way, there is no disappointment.
I am so glad to be done this series! I picked up all the volumes of it second-hand before I knew how irritating I found the author’s tone in these books. For whatever reason, I've been too stubborn to just cut my losses and turn them in at the used bookstore. First, I am allergic to puns, one of the mainstays of these characters. Second, although I have read some Robert Heinlein books and enjoyed some of them, I'm not a rabid fan and Robinson is. Third, like Heinlein, Robinson is a libertarian, an outlook of which I am skeptical . We need more community (ironically like Jake's little village of friends) and less rugged individualism.
As Callahan's books go, this one was better for me than the others. The mountainous and dumb-as-a-stick mafioso, Tony Donuts, provides comic relief. Jake and his crew manage to run circles around the guy, right up until they don't. But you've gotta know that the commune in the Florida Keys is up to the challenge. If there is one aspect of these books that I agree with wholeheartedly, it's that friendships are vitally important to the human being and that found family can be just as important as blood relations.
Book Number 439 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.
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