Genre: Science Fiction / Space Opera / Hopepunk
LGBTQ+ Category: Bi, Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
QSFer Beryll and Osiris Brackhaus has a new MM space opera out (bi, gay): Hoverballerino.
Back on his home planet Floor, Rene has settled into a cosy topside job as a barista, serving tea and cake to hone his social skills. Hoping for some quiet time to finalise his decision to become a travelling agent of the Circle, Rene finds himself entangled in the glitzy world of celebrity hoverball players in an unexpectedly personal way.
Kidnappings, crushed career dreams, evil spirits, and rituals gone confoundingly awry will require all his cunning to figure out. Fascinating mysteries aren’t just found among the stars; sometimes, they are right on your doorstep – both the mysteries and the stars, in this case. With a bit of luck and courage, he might even find the love of his life…
Written by award-winning authors Beryll and Osiris Brackhaus, Hoverballerino is a vibrant adventure romance novel about friendship, love and charting your own path. It is the third book in the ‘Dr Laurent’ series.
The Review
I re-read my reviews of the first two books in the Dr. Laurent series, and realized that a good many of the emotions I felt reading those, I revisited while reading “Hoverballerino.” The title is sly, but becomes clear soon enough. Everything I loved about the first two, I still love in number three. But the Brackhauses have done something a little different here.
In the vast complicated Virasana Empire, the planet Floor is distinctive. The startling variety of the cultures and conditions on the many planets in the Empire’s sprawling borders is always central to the Virasana books, and especially in Rene Laurent’s stories. Floor (which I pronounce as poor, not door—am I right?) is a special case. It is eerily like an apocalyptic vision of our own earth—or that planet in Star Wars where the Jedi Knights congregated.
It is an entirely urbanized planet, and the only one on which a noble family is not in control. Money rules Floor—which is to say corporations and the guilds that support them. Democracy did not survive earth, but ancient entrenched capitalism controls every aspect of life on Floor, from the glamorous estates in the sky, to the high-rise slums with deceptive names like Cherry Hills; to the depths of the underground far below the surface. The Circle of Thales hides carefully below the surface, and that’s where Rene Laurent grew up.
Dr. Laurent is, after all, a scholar and observer, and a member-in-training of the Circle of Thales—a secret organization to which his entire family belongs. Their single purpose is to study the empire and to record the truth—all the history that is either unexplained, or carefully ignored by the noble houses and corporations who make all the rules. Rene is admirably suited to this work, not least because of his rare and remarkable psionic powers. Not much is made of them in this book, but we are constantly reminded of them. In this story, we see the development of Rene Laurent’s humanity.
That’s where this book almost made me laugh out loud: it is a classic young adult nerd-meets-jock story. We get to look closely at Rene as an introverted, shy, and scrawny bookworm; and we get to watch a hugely famous sports star, a hoverball champion named Frederick Moravia, fall for him. It all begins in a small local tea-shop/bakery where Rene gets a part-time job to help him develop normal human social skills. It is adorable and cozy and sets the stage for a very different kind of adventure.
We never leave Floor in this book, although references to Rene’s last two adventures abound. We see Rene work hard to NOT use his psionic powers, and to work on things like conversation and eye contact. Nobody is more surprised than Rene when the tall, handsome, muscular sports star begins to pay attention to him.
Rather than gaining insight into far-flung planets in the empire, Rene begins to realize that Floor itself, with its dizzying social stratification and appalling climatic conditions (all largely mediated by technology) is a fascinating place—a place that merits close study, a place where there are many mysteries to be observed and recorded.
Like all Brackhaus adventures, the characters matter a lot here. Digging into Floorian culture means digging deep into the souls of both Rene and Frederick. In this marvelous fabricated world that is by turns laughably familiar (cellphones and emoji) and chillingly alien (slavery and mercenary death squads), we learn about the tenacity of the human heart to survive the shifting cultural changes of thousands of years of post-earth evolution.
Like all their other books, this one gave me much joy as I read it too fast. What an amazing series this would make on television.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
rvulysseUlysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New Yor
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