Review of Kristen Brand, “How Lady Nightmare Stole Captain Alpha’s Girlfriend”, Luna Station Quarterly 29 (2017): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
I love a good title, and this is a great title.
From such a title, one might think that the feature characters would be Lady Nightmare and Captain Alpha. But instead, it’s the unnamed girlfriend (who gets her name, Sara, in the first sentence of the story) that is the center of things. The tone that the narration takes, through a close 3rd person POV focused on Sara, is chatty and accessible, even when Sara is in the midst of experiences few readers can relate to (how many people have been taken hostage not once, but twice? And by a supervillain?). I found myself grinning intermittently (how can you not grin at sentences like “If Sara had known someone would be breaking into her home today, she would have cleaned”?) and rooting for Sara from the get-go. It didn’t take very long into the story before I’d formed a hope of how the rest of it would go, and Brand did not disappoint: I got exactly the happy ending I wanted. This was one of the most enjoyable, laugh-out-loud-able stories I’ve read recently, and I’m so glad I went back into the LSQ archives and found it.
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