Review: Hooray for More Alien Viewpoint Books!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 22, 2014
...in this case, our viewpoint character is an AI, and we get to spend the entire narrative in her head as she suffers through her purchase by a new owner and her installation into... a cruise ship. To handle passengers. To handle -biological- passengers, which her previous work as an accountant spared her. Dealing with biologicals directly is fraught with stresses, as Sarafina is about to find out... because her first cruise out (natch!) is not a nice, normal, easy one.There's so much to like about Queen of Roses. Sarafina is a believable AI; her reactions aren't human, while still having obvious genesis in human programmers, and thus, human mores. She's a likeable character as well, which isn't always a given when people try to write sapient computers. The book cleverly uses text to communicate the different modes of speech between AIs (a visual treat that will no doubt give an audiobook edition narrator conniptions!), and does a good job of giving us, the human readers, enough information to guess at the plot because of our knowledge of human behavior while poor Sarafina remains believably surprised and puzzled.I have withheld a star--mostly because the book starts slowly, and I wished for a lot more background detail than perhaps Sarafina was willing to give lectures on. Because the book takes place in the mind of an AI, we're limited in how much of the setting we get (literal, in this case, in sensory information about what it's like to be on the cruise liner). In the absence of that information, I would have loved more infodump to ground me in the AI's universe (and their history). The book doesn't suffer for the lack, but I missed it as a way to center myself in the narrative in the early half of the story.Nevertheless, this is a wonderful story, with a good-hearted and oft frustrated-by-human-illogic narrator (with whom I suspect many people will identify), and just enough adventure to give you an excuse to hang out with the characters of the good ship Queen of Roses. I dearly hope we get to see them again! Hint, hint, Author!