Review: Space Opera

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars

"Compared to you, humans are joyful rosebushes bouncing through the stars. If you ever stop napping long enough to escape the Earth, you would sweep across this galaxy like nothing before, an endless wave of carnage." (Elakhi to Capo, Oort's rather thankfully lazy cat.)

I love Cat Valente. I love her love of words, her writing, her narration, her Twitter, her Patreon, her recipes (YUM!), and her ethos. Thus, it should come as no surprise that I love this book.

Space Opera is being touted as a mashup of Eurovision and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and that does capture the general feeling. Decibel Jones and former bandmate Oort St. Ultraviolet (he of the Absolute Zeros) are just sleeping off a hangover and a failed marriage when an alien presence that I'll just call Roadrunner arrives to explain the fate of earth hangs in the balance and well, they better get on with it and do something about it. Well, actually the whole planet gets the message but it appears that Decibel Jones and the remaining Absolute Zero are going to be the ones to safeguard Earth's standing, and help us avoid binning and a planetary reboot. The way to save the earth is rather simple- just don't lose in the intergalactic competition that's the equivalent of Eurovision. Perform well enough to convince everyone that you're really sentient. Don't come in dead last or... you'll be dead.

At the heart of this book, we can question just how sentient the human race is. And how (or not) enlightened they are. And who else is sentient here on our wooly blue planet? Have we been wiping out some of our fellow sentients? And I'm not talking about the rhinos and elephants and lions. What about Aborigines and indigenous people and what the hell with ethnic cleansing?

But all that serious business is couched in a book that is a fun read moving along, if not at the speed of light, fast enough to keep the reader engaged and rooting for Dess and Oort. I know that readers new to Cat Valente's style are sometimes overwhelmed by her dense style of writing, which presses her love of words firmly toward the reader. The exuberance of the style is well suited to this subject matter, however. BECAUSE THERE'S A PLANET TO SAVE, assuming of course that it's worthy of saving. It's a book ripe for reading aloud or listening to Heath Miller's narration on audiobook. Just like the craziness of Hitchhiker's Guide, I loved it. Life may be beautiful, stupid and complicated (no 42 here, sorry) but singing and dancing can certainly only help make things better.



I received a Digital Review Copy from NetGalley and Saga Press in exchange for an honest review.

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