Tag: april daniels

#Review: SOVEREIGN, by April Daniels

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

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You may, perhaps, recall my exuberant review of April Daniels’ Dreadnought  from back in February.  I bought that book early and was kind of taken by surprise by it when it showed up in my mailbox, and then I was taken by surprise a second time when I enjoyed it as much as I did.  And it’s not only still on my shortlist for the best books of 2017, right now it’s still easily the best book I’ve read all year.

The sequel, Sovereign, showed up in my mailbox on Wednesday.  I preordered this motherfucker the second I found out it was available.  Thursday night, despite having slept all day and being generally exhausted, I made the terrible mistake of starting the book before bed, and as a result did not get nearly as much sleep as I wanted to.  Friday I woke up, took the boy to day care, came home, made myself breakfast, sat down in my recliner, and didn’t move again until I’d finished the book.  Partway through all that, I sent the following Tweet:

And I was telling the truth!  I did, indeed, have shit I wanted to do yesterday!  Shit involving my own books!  And I did absolutely none of it, because once I picked up Sovereign there was absolutely nothing else in my life that I needed to do other than finish that gatdamb book as quickly as I could.  April Daniels is the real deal, Goddammit, and now she’s written both of my two favorite books of the year.  I love this world, I love Danielle Tozer, I love the way this book does everything Book 2 in a series needs to do while setting up the third book quite nicely, and every single damn one of you needs to go pick up both of these books and read them right now because they are fantastic.  I wish I was half as good as Daniels is at this stuff.  Half.  I don’t know when the third book is coming out, but I plan to literally be the first person to preorder it when it does.

Why are you still here?  Go buy books, dammit.

#Review: DREADNOUGHT, by April Daniels

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

51CxH4-aSoL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgI don’t remember buying this book.  I don’t remember where I first encountered it, either, but it must have impressed me, as I must have pre-ordered it immediately.  I got a notification from Amazon that it had been shipped and actually had to look it up to figure out what it was.  And then I read the blurb and I was like, oh, right, this is definitely something I want to read.

I can’t call this the first great book I’ve read in 2017– it’s the third, actually– but one of those three was a kids’ book and the other was the third book in a trilogy.  So is it okay if I call this the first new hotness of the year?  It’s my blog, so yeah, it is.

This is one of those books where the premise will let you know right away whether you should buy the book or not: Daniel Tozer is a fifteen-year-old boy who happens to be the closest person when the world’s greatest superhero is killed, and he inherits the powers of that superhero, Dreadnought, when he dies.

And the first thing Dreadnought’s new powers do is remake Daniel’s body into the perfect body Daniel has always wanted.  Which means that Daniel becomes Danielle, and wakes up with unimaginable power and a woman’s body.

So that’s the first three pages, and there we go from there.  The broader beats of the story are sorta predictable, and you can probably imagine several of the complications that work their way into the story– friends, parents, a superteam that may not be what Danny thinks they are, and another high school friend who turns out to be a hero too.  The worldbuilding is solid (this is the first book of a series, so there’s room for not everything to be explained) and the action is solidly written– as fascinating as the premise is, you absolutely have to be able to nail action sequences to properly write a superhero novel, and Daniels excels at it.

So, whoever it was that turned me on to this book (Charlie Jane Anders blurbs it, so maybe it was her?), thank you.  I can’t wait for the next book in the series, and you should go read Dreadnought right the hell now.