Busted Flush, edited by George R. R. Martin

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers group ages ago. I’m not a huge superhero fan, but I enjoyed the book. The lack (more or less) of secret identities plus the way the aces worked with various government organizations made it seem more realistic to me.

It’s a mosaic novel, with nine authors writing chapters from the point of view of various characters. Several of the reviewers on LibraryThing said they found it hard to follow (it’s also the 19th book in the Wild Cards series); I had no trouble keeping all the characters straight even though I haven’t ready any of the previous books.

The good and the bad thing about such a structure is that you don’t stay with any given author/character for long. That’s good because I got bogged down in the second “chapter,” which is the first of three by Caroline Spector, but once I got through it the book didn’t go back to that character for quite a while. It’s bad because I could have read a whole novel centered on the character Melinda Snodgrass was writing (Noel). (I’m sure, like in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, other readers have completely opposite preferences from me.) Other intriguing storylines belong to Walton Simons and Ian Tregillis (Niobe and Drake) and Victor Milan (Tom and Dolores).

The only major problem was towards the end, when there were some too-abrupt character transformations and plot resolutions. It felt a bit like the authors had been writing happily along and suddenly realized they had almost reached their maximum wordcount.

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