Queen of Denial

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious four and a half star debut
Review: Selina Rosen has a winning effort in "Queen of Denial." The plot is fairly easy to sum up; Drewcila Quah has been a Salvager for many years. She's good at it; she drinks hard, loves hard, and swears a whole lot, as the other Salvagers do.

However, there's a secret in her past that is about to be revealed; seems that she's the missing Queen of an important planet. Her husband waited five years to come after her; now, he's found her.

The sparks fly, but not the way he wants. The King, Zarco, is a very boring guy; he's done a whole lot of warring, he slept with Drew's sister Stasha, and he's not a very nice guy at all in my opinion. Drew, even with all her swearing, bedding and other stuff, is the sympathetic one.

I really liked Drew; she's extremely funny. Her partner the alien is also amusing, and they interact well together. Her sister Stasha is also played for laughs, and is much more sympathetic than any other character in this book other than Drew.

Thing is, plot alone is not the reason to read this. The reason to read it is because it's absolutely, positively hilarious. There are many laugh out loud moments here, too many to list, and the _only_ real drawback is that the frontispiece for the novel (the initial page, explaining things) has a whole lot of punctuation and spelling errors. I don't completely understand this; how did it get through one printing that way, much less multiple printings?

Never mind. Ignore that page. The rest is extremely good.

So, the final tally is four and a half stars, highly recommended.

Barb Caffrey

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious four and a half star debut
Review: Selina Rosen has a winning effort in "Queen of Denial." The plot is fairly easy to sum up; Drewcila Quah has been a Salvager for many years. She's good at it; she drinks hard, loves hard, and swears a whole lot, as the other Salvagers do.

However, there's a secret in her past that is about to be revealed; seems that she's the missing Queen of an important planet. Her husband waited five years to come after her; now, he's found her.

The sparks fly, but not the way he wants. The King, Zarco, is a very boring guy; he's done a whole lot of warring, he slept with Drew's sister Stasha, and he's not a very nice guy at all in my opinion. Drew, even with all her swearing, bedding and other stuff, is the sympathetic one.

I really liked Drew; she's extremely funny. Her partner the alien is also amusing, and they interact well together. Her sister Stasha is also played for laughs, and is much more sympathetic than any other character in this book other than Drew.

Thing is, plot alone is not the reason to read this. The reason to read it is because it's absolutely, positively hilarious. There are many laugh out loud moments here, too many to list, and the _only_ real drawback is that the frontispiece for the novel (the initial page, explaining things) has a whole lot of punctuation and spelling errors. I don't completely understand this; how did it get through one printing that way, much less multiple printings?

Never mind. Ignore that page. The rest is extremely good.

So, the final tally is four and a half stars, highly recommended.

Barb Caffrey

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable!
Review: Selina's Rednecks of the Spaceways was just plain fun. Also, except for the maximum wage crack, her politics are better than any of the jokers running for President right now. Get this book! You will enjoy it! pmg

Rating:
Summary: Sci-Fi gets NO BETTER than this!
Review: The planet of Barious had finished a long war. Five years previously, during one of the conflicts, Taralin Zarco, Queen of Barious, was abducted by the Barion's mortal enemies the Locheds. The Locheds used Taralin as a test subject in their labs. After five years of captivity off planet Taralin no longer had any memories of being Queen of Barious. With the war over, King Zarco sent for his wife to return.

Drewcilia "Drew" Qwah was the best salvager in the galaxy. She drank too much, smoked too much, and had a mouth that would make a sailor blush! Her partner, Van Gar, was a huge hair covered alien. They were hired to escort the confused queen back to her husband. No matter how much Drew hated royalty, it was a lot of beer money for a SIMPLE escort job.

***** This story is down-right edible! I felt as though Drew was a female Han Solo since her morals seem to be the same and her partner looks much like a Wookie. No nonsense, beer guzzling, hilarious, and NOT TO BE MISSED! I loved every second! *****

Rating:
Summary: Funny premise ruined by gratuitous obscenity & poor editing
Review: There's a mildly funny short story here. It's buried, however, under piles of unnecessary 4-letter words, and grammatical errors and word misuse that weren't picked up by the editors.

Meisha Merlin usually does a better job than this - if I were the copyeditor and proofreader mentioned on the copyright page, I would ask to have my name removed. The Liaden universe novels come out pretty much free of errors; why shouldn't we expect the same for a smaller book? For example, on the first-page blurb alone, we have this: "Enter Drewcila Qwah a ruff and tumble salvager, who drinks to much, smokes to much, and has a mouth you wouldn't kiss your mother with. Drew and her partner, a huge hair covered alien named Van Gar, have been hired by the kings emissaries to take the confused queen to meet her husband." OK, if the use of "to" instead of "too" didn't bother you, the lack of commas in some places, lack of apostrophes and hyphens in others, didn't bother you, then perhaps you won't be as annoyed as I am.

I don't think there's a single page that has fewer than two [expletive] on it, and after a while, I got distracted by counting the number of [expletive] and [expletive] on each page, to the detriment of whatever the characters were otherwise saying. I think the obscenities are meant to convey the notion of blue-collar, working class culture, but it's an insult to blue-collar workers everywhere.

There are authors who know how to use vocabulary to good effect. Tanya's Huff's "Valor" series (two books so far) has the enlisted personnel using their share of four-letter words, and every bit of it sounds realistic and necessary. Rosen's doesn't.

There's a happy ending, of sorts, if a bit lame. As I said, there's a pretty funny short story in here. The "huge, hair-covered alien" (forgive me, I couldn't resist the impulse to add the proper punctuation) is a lovable Wookie type, who is secretly in love with our, um, heroine. The Royal Family and its courtiers contain some stereotypes, but they're amusing. There are a couple of cute references to classic stories (I think I caught one to Sturgeon's "Killdozer") So, if you're not bothered by the flaws, you'll probably enjoy this.

Rating:
Summary: Wow, this is bad.
Review: There's not even a serious attempt at a story, a plot, or characters.

Rating:
Summary: A truly funny book.
Review: This book is pretty funny, I made the mistake of trying to read it wile my toddler was asleep. my laughter came real close to waking him up.
The heroine reminds me of Han Solo in star wars, but female.
My only objection to this book is all the fowl language. That alone almost made me quit reading it in the first chapter. Other than that it is quite entertaining, though the length of the story does not seem to warrant the high price tag. It was funny though and I will probably buy her books again.

Rating:
Summary: Rednecks In Outer Space!
Review: This book was a lot of fun and a definite change of pace from "typical" SF (if there is any such thing), starting with Don Maitz' truly magnificent cover, which grabbed me by the lapels, dragged me over to the bookcase it was displayed on, and forced me to pick it up. Selina Rosen took over from there and carried me off to a magical universe with beer cans and ice chests and rednecks in space. Drewcilia's and her partner, Van Gar's attempts to cope with the twists and turns of this intrigue make for a lot of fun, and I only have two nits to pick, which cost it a star. First, the book gets a little politically preachy in spots, which causes it to drag as we switch from wickedly funny to earnest and sincere, and second, although plot twists conceal it until the end, this is clearly the first volume of a planned series so that the main characters end up not changing a bit, which was something of a disappointment. But if you want to boldly go where no SF author I've ever read has gone before, say hello to the Queen Of Denial.

Rating:
Summary: Rednecks In Outer Space!
Review: This book was a lot of fun and a definite change of pace from "typical" SF (if there is any such thing), starting with Don Maitz' truly magnificent cover, which grabbed me by the lapels, dragged me over to the bookcase it was displayed on, and forced me to pick it up. Selina Rosen took over from there and carried me off to a magical universe with beer cans and ice chests and rednecks in space. Drewcilia's and her partner, Van Gar's attempts to cope with the twists and turns of this intrigue make for a lot of fun, and I only have two nits to pick, which cost it a star. First, the book gets a little politically preachy in spots, which causes it to drag as we switch from wickedly funny to earnest and sincere, and second, although plot twists conceal it until the end, this is clearly the first volume of a planned series so that the main characters end up not changing a bit, which was something of a disappointment. But if you want to boldly go where no SF author I've ever read has gone before, say hello to the Queen Of Denial.

Rating:
Summary: Buy This Book
Review: This is a first class, fast-paced, funny, irreverent, well- written, science fiction novel that I recommend to you without reservation. Buy it.