Guest Review: Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland

[helloladies]

Jenny Hamilton writes about spaceships and smooching for outlets including Reactor, Strange Horizons, and Lady Business. She can be found on Bluesky having opinions about 1990s SF TV.

I recently read a book review that bemoaned the tendency of comedic novels to cram in serious stuff at the end to make the reader feel like she’d eaten a full meal. A little taken aback, I performed an informal survey in my personal library of Funny Books I Liked Enough to Buy to determine the amount of serious stuff they contained; which produced the confronting realization that virtually every funny book I liked enough to buy contains, or is premised upon, mass death. This sounds like a weird joke but it isn’t, and I don’t have a punchline. I promise I don’t think mass death is funny. I have laughed about death at Mass a lot, though, and maybe that accounts for it. The literal only exception is Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, and perhaps not coincidentally, he’s the author of the above-mentioned book review. ( Read more... )