Hard Luck Hank: Screw The Galaxy by Steven Campbell (4.5 stars)

This is noir sci-fi comedy. Wrap your head around that, or "Eat suck, suckface". Hank is an amazing character, I loved him from the beginning. He's a self-described thug and a mutant with a superpower - he's very dense (heh), which makes him very hard to hurt. He has an offbeat, self-deprecating sense of humour that is just perfect. I can't remember the last time I liked a character so much.

 The story is exciting and ridiculous. Hank ends up negotiating on behalf of the human race with a vastly technologically superior race in a monogrammed pink bathrobe:

I looked at the robe for some time, wondering if I should get them to exchange it, but they had gone to the trouble to get it monogrammed. Besides, just because pink was a pansy color where I came from didn't mean anything out here. For all I knew it could be the galactic color of death and destruction.

The Colmarian world Campbell has built is hilarious in a dark way, and every bit as dysfunctional and contradictory as you'd expect a space station run by criminals to be.

The only thing Colmarians found more frightening than effective government was Ontakians: the race that had designed my very special plasma pistol.

I'll be reading more of this series.

4.5 stars

Son by Lois Lowry (2 stars)

This was the final novel in The Giver quartet, which I approached with much trepidation given the previous two were pretty awful. The start is a completely pleasant surprise.

We're back in the land of The Giver, seeing events from a different perspective. This section is moving, disturbing, and the reader grows to love Claire's determination to see her son. Great stuff, just like the original. The section describing her being forced to give birth with a mask on so as not to get attached to the "product" (i.e. baby) is horrifying.

The plot comes to same climax as in the first novel, except we're only one quarter of the way through. And then this novel completely loses itself. Claire ends up in a completely different community, with memory loss, and we endure a long boring account of her daily life that eventually firms up into a rock climbing training montage. The catch is that it's a 7 year training montage.

Once we're done with the lengthy rock climbing descriptions we step into the supernatural with our creepy friend from Trade Mart. And then we find out that Gabe, beautiful Gabe that Jonas risked his life for, and countless real-world parents named their real babies after, is actually kind of a little brat. Way to take the wind from the sails there.

So, there's an incredibly preachy biblical-parable-style end, and some closure to the whole series, but I'd be amazed if you're happy about how it turned out, I wasn't.

2 stars.