Lady Eve's Last Con
Apr. 6th, 2024 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaLady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow.
Ruthi Johnson (currently going by Evelyn Ojukwu) is running a con on the awkward heir of a major intergalactic insurance concern to get back at him for jilting her baby sister. But it's hard to focus on breaking Esteban's heart when his wildly dashing half-sister is standing right next to him.
This--like the ostensible Miss Ojukwu's game--is the kind of project that takes a massive amount of craftsmanship to pull off while seeming light-hearted and casual the entire time. There's an immense satisfaction in watching the various gears line up. If you're thinking of Ruthi's universe as a hand-crafted mechanism, it's one with a surprising heft: early twentieth-century musical comedy IN SPACE needs no extra justification, but I appreciated the depth in Fraimow's imagined cultures. Even the seemingly frothiest fashions are based on assumptions about where money comes from and how it is used, and there are layers and layers beneath questions such as why debutantes wear bubble-dresses (the better to dance in half-gravity!) or when it's gauche to take a radiation pill before eating, to say nothing of the best methods for interstellar transport of kosher duck.
(I read this book as a NetGalley ARC; in the US, it comes out on June 4.)
Ruthi Johnson (currently going by Evelyn Ojukwu) is running a con on the awkward heir of a major intergalactic insurance concern to get back at him for jilting her baby sister. But it's hard to focus on breaking Esteban's heart when his wildly dashing half-sister is standing right next to him.
This--like the ostensible Miss Ojukwu's game--is the kind of project that takes a massive amount of craftsmanship to pull off while seeming light-hearted and casual the entire time. There's an immense satisfaction in watching the various gears line up. If you're thinking of Ruthi's universe as a hand-crafted mechanism, it's one with a surprising heft: early twentieth-century musical comedy IN SPACE needs no extra justification, but I appreciated the depth in Fraimow's imagined cultures. Even the seemingly frothiest fashions are based on assumptions about where money comes from and how it is used, and there are layers and layers beneath questions such as why debutantes wear bubble-dresses (the better to dance in half-gravity!) or when it's gauche to take a radiation pill before eating, to say nothing of the best methods for interstellar transport of kosher duck.
(I read this book as a NetGalley ARC; in the US, it comes out on June 4.)