You Sexy Thing

I feel like there's a sort of tone you expect from a novel titled “You Sexy Thing” in a series titled “Disco Space Opera” that has a GBBO comp on the cover, and this book does not have that tone. It is extremely dark and graphic, as well as staggeringly cruel to one of the characters for seemingly no reason. Most of the characters feel like cardboard cutouts (the Firefly references are a mile a minute) and traits seem to spring up as required by the narrative. Most of the characters have no initiative at all and are simply shunted here and there by the plot. It's only getting 2 stars because I thought the cooking stuff was fun and the ship at least had a personality.

I was sold on the idea of “Farscape meets The Great British Bake Off”, or more specifically the Farscape half of that. The sprinklings of other sci fi genre tropes were a bonus to me. While there is cooking involved, it becomes less relevant to the central plot and becomes more of an ancillary device to catch Atlanta up to speed as she learns from Dabry. This isn't a bad thing, but I hope we get to see Dabry have a moment to shine in any future stories.

I found myself getting agitated with the main antagonist as his "revenge" kept seemingly dragging on with his showboating of having the upper hand. The payoff of the escape left me slightly confused. Not sure if I missed it, but I thought the device used to control it stopped it from doing anything other than what the operator said. After the escape, that device was explained as the reason it could pick and choose what it did. Would have liked more explanation on that front, but we have future stories that could explain that.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and look forward to future stories of this crew.

Rounding up, but did enjoy!