F+
Genre: Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Star Princess is the most deranged book I’ve ever read. If this novella were a person, it would be someone who dropped a ton of ecstasy and rolled around in glitter and danced on a laptop while at a rave. This story demands a plot summary with spoilers so beware because I’m going to spoil EVERYTHING.
Princess Ro’sa, who is green, is supposed to leave her home planet, Minjet, and go to Earth. Earth is a polluted mess and Minjet is not, so Ro’sa is supposed to teach the people of Earth how to clean every thing up. This plan involves an arranged marriage between her and an Earthling, Prince Deion. One reason I wanted to read Star Princess was that it featured a black male protagonist. Sadly, his race seems to involve a lot of fetish fuel. He has blue eyes and dark skin, and there’s a lot of attention paid to his lips and a ton of description of him as chocolate (Ro’sa’s friend Ka’lyn says she wants to lick him). No one describes Ro’sa as having a complexion like the firmest, freshest broccoli, but Deion is chocolate boy.
Deion is as nervous about meeting Ro’sa as she is about meeting him, and he gets sick, and he asks his friend Cyrus to pretend to be him for the first meeting. Cyrus is a major shithead and hits on other women at the engagement dinner so Ro’sa hates him. Incidentally, surely everyone in Deion’s group must recognize Cyrus, but Deion, the actual prince, is completely unattended during his rather severe illness. You’d think retainers and royal doctors would flock to his bedside, but no.
Anyway, Deion gets over his 24 hour flu problem and he runs into Ro’sa, who is all “I hate your Prince so I’m going to jump off a cliff into the ocean and you’ll think I’m drowning and come rescue me and we’ll have revenge sex”. But Deion doesn’t want to have sex under false pretenses. This is very honorable but I think it should rank below not wanting to have sex with a person who manipulates you into sex by jumping off a cliff right after she reveals personal matters that are also highly sensitive political issues. After some intense petting in the ocean, they part ways, and she runs off before he can reveal his identity.
Later Deion runs into Ro’sa and wants to confess, but she wants to talk in an elevator and he is afraid of elevators. So to distract himself from his phobia he makes out with her in the elevator, as one does. Then she tells him that she can’t have sex with him because she’s supposed to marry the prince, and she runs off again before Deion can tell her who he is.
So then Deion runs into the King, Ro’sa’s father, in the elevator, and it turns out that the king also has elevator phobia, but to my intense disappointment they don’t make out. They just talk about it.
At this point you may feel that my use of the phrase “runs into” is overly repetitive but that’s all these people ever do. They wander around and have chance meetings. The entire book is based on people encountering one another accidentally and at random.
Then there are explosions, and the king says they are under attack and he drags Deion down a bunch of corridors while yelling that Minjet has a contingency plan, and it’s the most random thing ever. It’s as though another book took over the story. Again, if this novella were a glitter-bathed person on ecstacy, now would be the time where said novella downed three or four Red Bulls just to see what would happen. You have to admire the kind of gonzo madness at work here.
Ro’sa’s best friend turns out to be a bodyguard and she puts Ro’sa on a space ship headed for Earth, so that the royal family can live on even though their entire planet is pretty much trashed. Meanwhile Deion tried to save the king and queen but they die, which is very sad. It’s also very weird, because one minute Deion is taking bullets for them and it looks like they’ll be fine and they next minute the crew of their respective space ships says, “Hey Ro’sa, hey Deion, while you were asleep the king and queen died, sorry.”
Ro’sa wakes up alone in a room with no food or water and she wanders out into a corridor full of refugees who yell at her. Somebody shoves her into a side tunnel and she crawls out and wanders around the woods, as one does. Deion finds out that she’s alive but that she wandered off after refugees yelled at her (there’s a lot of incredibly snobby talk about how the refugees are “vagrants” and there’s weird talk about how their nanny wears a crown because she’s a snob but the real queen doesn’t which…OK).
Deion finds Ro’sa and explains everything. They finally have sex, and the phrase “tearing of her virgin tissue” is used, which is a phrase I never need to see again. A year later (try to keep up) Ro’sa has used Minjet know-how to save Earth from pollution etc. It’s only been a year, but already huge herds of animals are roaming the green planet probably while “Circle of Life” plays on the soundtrack. Ro’sa is pregnant, and she finally makes contact with Minjet where everything is fine, and her best friend the bodyguard is also pregnant, and babies are so wonderful and everything is awesome and covered in glitter and I can count all the molecules in my hand and can I have a Red Bull?
This book was terrible, simply terrible, but also kind of fun because… what the hell? It’s not coherent, it’s not constructed, and it’s the weirdest mash up of stuff thrown together. Let’s have the Waschowski siblings make a movie of it. You know they are looking for something to do now that Jupiter Ascending is over. It’s right up their alley.
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“No one describes Ro’sa as having a complexion like the firmest, freshest broccoli, but Deion is chocolate boy.”
Jesus. I just about broke a rib laughing.
I’m yet to read this but I just had to go EEEEEEE first. I get so happy when I see an F+. So much fun is ahead!
I think I sprained a dimple laughing so hard at this review. It almost – almost, that is – makes me want to read an ecstasy-laced glitter bomb like this book. Thank you so much Carrie for suffering through it for such a fan-bloody-tastic review.
@Friday:
I think I sprained a dimple laughing so hard at this review.
That is an awesomely perfect description – I know that exact feeling, too! I had the same reaction when I was formatting the review to post today.
You know, I sort of wish someone would write a romance novel where the heroine, be she alien or magic, wasn’t just a hot humanoid indistinguishable from humans except for some superficial stuff. I feel like media (especially games) have given a lot of male love interests who were very alien looking, such as Mass Effect’s Garrus (http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Garrus_Vakarian) and The Last Hour of Gann, but you never see that done for women. I wonder if there’s some psychology behind that, like some aversion to making a female character, especially a romantic lead, who’s anything less than conventionally beautiful. I think it’d make for an interesting story.
I actually went and looked up an author photo to see if maybe she was black herself, but nope. There used to be a sex column I read in a Canadian online newspaper years ago that was always very funny and well-written, and at one point, the author got in an extended argument with a guy who didn’t see why his fetishizing of Asian women were uncomfortable, complete with lots of descriptions of how he’s just attracted to their “long, sleek hands, their rivers of dark hair, their MISCHIEVOUS, SECRETIVE EYES”… it was so weird, and he didn’t get the issue, because he just kept insisting it was all flattering. I just wish the archives of the column hadn’t been taken offline because it was a really insightful, interesting conversation, especially since he showed up to defend himself in the comments. I can’t remember if he ever came around to understand the other point of view, but I doubt it, since he had his heels dug in pretty hard.
This is what happens when you try to turn your After Earth/Guardians of the Galaxy slashfic into a novel a la 50 Shades of Grey. Kitai Raige and Gamora is just too weird of a pairing to work.
Carrie
A good friend and I went to see “Jupiter Ascending” because of your awesome review and we had a great time. Alas, I don’t think I will be reading this, even though I got a great deal of enjoyment out of it.
@Leah–the only example I can think of is The Will’s spider ladylove in the graphic novel series “Saga” and they are minor characters, not the romantic leads.
Thank you for another hilarious F review :).
Well, of course I had to buy this. I could use a few laughs to balance the pain and grief I’m experiencing while reading the tragedy that is Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. People who think vampires are scary should meet Gilbert Osmond, that real-life soul sucker. Anyway, this will give some comic, if incoherent, relief. It’s nice and short, too, so I don’t have to wade through pages of crazy sauce.
@Leah – this isn’t a romance novel, but in the China Mieville book Perdido Street Station, the hero’s girlfriend, an artist, is a member of a species that seem to have basically-human bodies but giant beetles for heads. (China Mieville is a genius (although of the Deep Weird variety) so this works better than I could have imagined possible, but I do remember feeling a lot of “Oh my god her head is a beetle” at first, it was pretty startling.)
I periodically read SF-leaning romance, and I’m almost always left cold. It seems like such a great opportunity to make explicit and external and the vast differences between two people falling in love! Instead it’s mostly “the 7-foot Fabio models of Rygel 9 have run out of women. Now they haunt Earth’s classiest BDSM clubs looking for human mates.”
It’s all my fault. The coffee stain on my sweater. But then again caffeine pales as a afternoon-pick-me-up in comparison to your epic review. So, eh. I’ll soak the sweater tonight while laughing all over again as I picture a chocolate-broccoli romance. HA
@Leah The only example that I can think of in romance is Meljean Brook’s Demon Angel. And even there, Lilith does not always look like a red-skinned cloven-hoofed demon!
The review was so funny. I will definitely not read this hot mess.
@Leah Closest I can think of is “Labyrinth” by Lois McMaster Bujold. And it’s actually science fiction, not romance. And the heroine is a genetically modified human, not actually an alien. But she definitely doesn’t look completely human, and she also doesn’t look like a supermodel. But she’s adorable.
@Doug Glassman – Kitai Raige/Gamora 50 Shades cross-over fic. Bawahaha! That was almost as good as, “No one describes Ro’sa as having a complexion like the firmest, freshest broccoli, but Deion is chocolate boy.” Well done.
I don’t know if the author is going to be aghast at this review or think it’s the best thing ever …because I am so damn curious about this book now that I almost think I have to buy it and read this nonsense for myself. Thanks for giving me a huge laugh tonight.
Hilarious review! Especially the reference to the “Circle of Life” soundtrack. Too funny.
This review is awesome.
This was hilarious. “…as one does.” I have been living under a rock and did not realize SBTB had an SFR reviewer, which is awesome because it is one of my favorite genres and now I can read the SBTB treatment of them. 🙂 I’m going to look up some of my other favorites…
@Leah this is a pretty good example of the issue. . . .: http://oglaf.com/dimorphism/