Readcommendations

By Laura Loup

Happy Pride month! And happy release to book two of my favorite gaylien series, The Audacity by Laura Loup. I discovered this series last year and instantly fell in love with May and Xan, every day human turned rocket racer and blue-skinned Thuntian with a mysterious past turned I Love Lucy binge-watcher. Now the sequel is out, and it’s even more hilarious than the first.

Summary

May’s career as an interstellar rocket racer is just ramping up. She’s got a stunning ship, her best friend Xan for a co-pilot, and a rocket-full of winnings. But obscenely good luck can’t last forever, and May has been racing in a stolen ship. When Xan’s arrested by a tea-sipping, goddess-possessed pink robot for a crime he can’t bring himself to explain without baking analogies, May’s career is over. With the help of an adventure biologist and her freshly un-dead girlfriend, May and Xan must find a way to change the past before the goddess of Chaos squashes everything May loves.

Musings

There’s just so much to love about this series: anyone who’s a fan of Douglas Adams and the absurd of the cosmos will feel at home among these pages, laughing at the zany space adventures and the narrator’s deft turn of phase – and occasional meta joke. Book 2 does not disappoint: it’s got everything you love from the first book and is sure to make you roar with laughter.

But the series has so much heart, too. The developing relationship between Xan and May isn’t one you see often (if at all), where May is openly Asexual/Aromantic while Xan is on the other side of the spectrum. Are they a couple, or a couple of besties? It doesn’t seem to matter to them. They are fully loving and supportive of each other which only makes me love them more.

We also meet Xan’s sister, Aimz, a hilarious StarTaxi driver who’s rather miffed her brother hasn’t been around for a millenia. Xan’s past is coming to bite him in the rear – we finally learn how he acquired the Audacity, and what happened to planet Thunt. It’s not pretty. Loup somehow manages to balance absurdity and a deep examination of mental illness as a result of trauma in the same go, which is difficult to achieve and amazing to read.

Tie this all together with a planet-saving-or-destroying adventure, a mad goddess enraged from the last book, a reanimated corpse, busted translators, and revealing swimwear, and you’ve got a wonderful book to devour. I can’t wait for book three!