So, I don't DNF (did not finish) books very often. If a book gets my attention enough to move up the list to having me start it, I generally want to give it the chance to show me what it's got. But I read one treadmill-session worth of Musketeer Space and then closed it and chose a new book. And I'd like to explain why, even if just to myself.
This is a good book. A very imaginative, well-crafted, well-written story. It takes The Three Musketeers, gender-flips it, adds some delicious diversity to the cast, then gives it a space opera setting where the Musketeers fly cyber-implant guided ships from their base at Paris Space Station. It's clever and funny and even manages to provide sympathetic and believable underpinnings to D'Artagnan's initial belligerent jackassishness.
But I didn't finish it--indeed, I barely started it. And the reason, as best I can explain, is that it doesn't feel like an interpretation of 3 Musketeers, but rather like a translation. I got a strong impression that I got all the essentials of the creative innovation in the first few chapters, but the story itself was going to run in precise parallel with the original. Which I have read. And don't feel like re-reading at this time.
I may be wrong--I could easily be wrong, given that I only scratched the beginning. And other than the story not being different enough from one I'd already read, there's nothing actually wrong with this book. It's a very well-written book. And if you're the sort of reader for whom the idea of diverse gender-flipped space musketeers is catnip--and especially if you've never actually read the story in the original (or if you think that wouldn't be a problem for you) then by all means let me know how much you enjoyed it!
Comments2
I rarely quit on a book that
I rarely quit on a book that I've gotten as much as fifty pages into. Occasionally the first three will draw me in and then as I get farther the taste changes. This does sound as though I would like it, but fact that you describe it as feeling like a translation suggests I might not. I haven't been able to read the Three Musketeers in adulthood because it's in translation (and my French isn't good enough to read it quickly in the original.) When I was a child, after the first time, I used to let the book fall open and start reading anywhere, and then go back and catch up with the beginning if I felt like it, and even so I can't really remember the plot, just incidents. I sort of want to read this just to find out if I react to it as you did.
To be clear, it's not that
To be clear, it's not that the prose style sounds like a translation, it's that it feels like the entire plot structure has simply been applied as-is to the new setting and characters. Sort of like those "I'm going to do a re-imagined fairy tale, but everything's going to happen in the same way as the original" things. And that's where I could easily be dead wrong if it starts diverging later in the book.