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Feb. 6th, 2019 06:14 pmA few months ago I agreed to trade ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
littlerhymes some endearingly mediocre published Arthurian fanfic in exchange for a dealer's choice Dick Francis novel.
This turned out to be Flying Finish, which is about PLANES and SMUGGLING and BIRTH CONTROL PILLS and maybe also TERRORISTS?
Our Hero Henry Gray is a very reserved, buttoned-up, socially awkward lord's heir who one day decides his life is meaningless and subsequently scandalizes his entire family by going and getting a manual job helping to ship horses back and forth from the UK. I liked him very much, although I did start snickering a little meanly to myself whenever he started explaining sadly to somebody else about how the aristocracy are very oppressed! everyone judges them by their titles and nice normal people don't wish to be friends with them and sometimes they get bullied at work for this accident of birth that they just can't help! THAT'S ROUGH, BUDDY.
But, that aside, I really enjoyed Henry's story of learning to Be A Person Who Has Emotions And Likes Himself. I also liked Henry's love interest, Gabriella, who runs the airport gift shop and as a sideline smuggles birth control pills into the country, but I was a little disappointed that they literally fell in love at first sight; I always feel a little cheated by that, but especially when the protagonists are both characters I'm interested in and ESPECIALLY when at least one of them has poor social skills that would make it challenging, because I want to see how they manage to connect with each other and having it happen at first sight skips over all the most interesting-to-me parts!
BUT ANYWAY, the actual plot: several people who work at Henry's company have disappeared, and also there's one asshole coworker who keeps beating Henry up for no reason, and at first Henry's like 'it's probably just a class thing, that thing where people bully you at work sometimes for an aspect of your identity that you had no choice about, which in this case is that you are a member of the landed gentry?'
BUT MAYBE IT'S NOT ACTUALLY A CLASS THING, MAYBE IT'S A CRIME THING.
(As a sidenote, asshole coworker is a very intense vaguely sociopathic nineteen-year-old with a chip on his shoulder and carefully described pretty, almost androgynous features and in, say, an Ellen Kushner book his initial physical clashes with Henry would possibly have gone a VERY different way. I'm just saying.)
It takes Henry about 60% of the book to get around to investigating it though because he's busy falling in love at first sight, and trying to juggle his job and his family and his hobby of flying airplanes and his surprise new Italian girlfriend and his own personal growth, and honestly, that's all fair. It's a lot of extracurriculars to balance before he gets around to the stoic suffering and grimly determined action heroics involving planes and horses!
littlerhymes some endearingly mediocre published Arthurian fanfic in exchange for a dealer's choice Dick Francis novel.This turned out to be Flying Finish, which is about PLANES and SMUGGLING and BIRTH CONTROL PILLS and maybe also TERRORISTS?
Our Hero Henry Gray is a very reserved, buttoned-up, socially awkward lord's heir who one day decides his life is meaningless and subsequently scandalizes his entire family by going and getting a manual job helping to ship horses back and forth from the UK. I liked him very much, although I did start snickering a little meanly to myself whenever he started explaining sadly to somebody else about how the aristocracy are very oppressed! everyone judges them by their titles and nice normal people don't wish to be friends with them and sometimes they get bullied at work for this accident of birth that they just can't help! THAT'S ROUGH, BUDDY.
But, that aside, I really enjoyed Henry's story of learning to Be A Person Who Has Emotions And Likes Himself. I also liked Henry's love interest, Gabriella, who runs the airport gift shop and as a sideline smuggles birth control pills into the country, but I was a little disappointed that they literally fell in love at first sight; I always feel a little cheated by that, but especially when the protagonists are both characters I'm interested in and ESPECIALLY when at least one of them has poor social skills that would make it challenging, because I want to see how they manage to connect with each other and having it happen at first sight skips over all the most interesting-to-me parts!
BUT ANYWAY, the actual plot: several people who work at Henry's company have disappeared, and also there's one asshole coworker who keeps beating Henry up for no reason, and at first Henry's like 'it's probably just a class thing, that thing where people bully you at work sometimes for an aspect of your identity that you had no choice about, which in this case is that you are a member of the landed gentry?'
BUT MAYBE IT'S NOT ACTUALLY A CLASS THING, MAYBE IT'S A CRIME THING.
(As a sidenote, asshole coworker is a very intense vaguely sociopathic nineteen-year-old with a chip on his shoulder and carefully described pretty, almost androgynous features and in, say, an Ellen Kushner book his initial physical clashes with Henry would possibly have gone a VERY different way. I'm just saying.)
It takes Henry about 60% of the book to get around to investigating it though because he's busy falling in love at first sight, and trying to juggle his job and his family and his hobby of flying airplanes and his surprise new Italian girlfriend and his own personal growth, and honestly, that's all fair. It's a lot of extracurriculars to balance before he gets around to the stoic suffering and grimly determined action heroics involving planes and horses!
