Review: A Different Kind of Heroine on a Different Kind of Adventure
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 11, 2014
Moira Noonan isn't your usual kick-ass heroine: she's a college student who's following in her father's footsteps to become a physicist.  She's smart and funny and has a kind of unique, skewed take on things.  The last thing she has on her mind is swinging a sword or taking a road trip on another, more violent and primitive world.  Her biggest concern is studying for her calculus final.Then a blast from the past appears: her mom, Alice, who'd left Moira and her dad more than decade before.  Her mom expresses a deep regret, but refuses to explain further, offering Moira a book instead (which turns out to have been written by her).  The book details life on a world named Akrasia.  Moira and her dad think either Alice is crazy or is an aspiring fantasy novelist – but the book seems too dry to qualify as entertainment.For some reason, Moira's mom doesn't see the danger in the summoning spell in the book, and not really taking any of it seriously, Moira tries the spell on a lark, with disastrous results.There's a long, mostly unbroken series of adventures that have Moira being trained as a gladiator and a personal servant to an Akrasian bureaucrat (she describes her as looking like a Star Trek alien...in other words, not especially alien) as she plots her escape to back to Earth.Then the story ends, a bit abruptly, I thought.  I wouldn't say the book's too short, but I feel like we're being pushed a little into purchasing the next book in the series.  But then that's how the book business goes these days.  Basically a very fun read with a smarter and funnier than average main character and set a different cast of "monsters" from the usual vampires, werewolves, demons, etc.