The Lightning-Struck Heart by T.J. KluneMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
An apprentice to the King's Wizard who gets kidnapped constantly, pines for the hunky Knight Commander, loves his parents, and has a hornless gay unicorn and a half-giant for best friends? Hilarious!! Absolutely crazy, and you just have to go with the flow. Or quest. Because, you know, rescuing the prince who's been kidnapped by a talking dragon and all that.
This is a long book (in print it's almost 400 pages, and the ebook version I read was over 600 pages), full of sass, snark, adventure, romance, heartbreak, sex puns, and magic. The characters are delightful--even the supposed villains cracked me up--and the dialogue had me convulsing with laughter.
Warning, though: you must have a VERY high tolerance for profanity and gay sex puns to enjoy this book. Seriously. So. Much. Swearing. And reference to sex--acts, organs, feelings. No actual sex scenes until the last few pages, though, unless you count the...er...interspecies encounter Sam unfortunately overhears a few chapters earlier. (He'll never get those images out of his brain! Gah!) As a straight woman, the actual sex scenes weren't my cup of tea, but they're more or less analogous to hetero sex scenes in some of the steamier romance novels I've read.
Almost all the characters were queer--mostly gay, one was asexual, and "Mama" was a drag queen. There were some token CIS characters, namely Sam's parents, the King, and the female members of the Ryan Foxheart fan club. I loved that being gay was completely ordinary and unremarkable. Even the Prince was gay, and that was no big deal because somehow gay men could have babies (although how was not explained).
The one thing that kept my rating from being 5 stars (and I know it's kind of nit-picky) was that the author & his copy editor REALLY need to learn the difference between "who" and "whom." Every single time "whom" should have been used...it wasn't. And there was at least one case where "I" was used in place of "me." The grammar mistakes yanked me out of the story and made me long for the ability to teach Mr. Klune & his editor about the difference between subjective & objective pronouns. It wouldn't have hurt for the book to have been a teensy bit shorter, although I feel like I should duck and cover for saying that.
This is the first in a series, and I look forward to reading the next installments!
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