This past Tuesday (June 16), I finished "Red Sonja: Consumed" by Gail Simone on my Kindle while I was sitting in the Jury Lounge in Providence, RI. (I didn't get picked. Day off reading in a crappy room - not all bad)
If you want to follow me on Storygraph, you can find my brief review of the book here.
I will add here that I think Simone does perhaps the best job of fixing the weird old horny and misogynistic Best Her to Bed Her trope by just....not mentioning it at all. In fact, the Sonja in this book is just simply horny, and gets down with whoever she pleases whenever she sees fit. The character never needed the trope, and in fact, no character ever did. So, Simone just acts like it was never there to begin with, which I applaud.
A new nitpick of mine that hadn't fully formed until now is that I found the lore behind the admittedly cool bad guys to be a bit unclear. Were they exiled from Hyrkania? Were they citizens of another nation, left for dead? Either way, how exactly did they become what they are now? I really shouldn't be that unclear on these points, even allowing for my brain's tendency to wander when I should be focusing on something.
I still really enjoyed this book, and it's a hell of a prose debut from someone who has pretty much only written comics for the past few decades. However, those two cringy sentence fragments are SUPER cringy, so much so that I'm hoping they don't become one of the main things I remember about this novel (see the Storygraph review linked above)
And now that I've finished the Red Sonja book, I have started on this collection of new and old short fiction celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the "Weird Tales" pulp magazine:
I've owned it for at least a couple of years, so it's about time I dove in, eh?
