Review: Requiem by D.M. Pruden

Requiem came out of the box with two strikes. First, it is a prequel. I may be the last holdout on the planet, but I still don’t like them. From time to time one might be good, but more often than not you seem to end up with an author who thinks they can make you like the character who you know is going to be in charge of the game that has children murder each other or the guy who is going to end up killing a bunch of younglings. And even when it isn’t about the villain, it still lowers the tension.

And what’s worse than that? A book written in the first person present. You may think that’s impossible. No one would write a book in first person present. That’s insane. Well, that is partiality true. He didn’t write one book in first person present. From what I can tell from the descriptions and the assumption he didn’t change, he wrote at least six. And while I read and enjoyed the novella that was distracting and I don’t know that I could go through an entire book that way. Though I may at some point try.

But I don’t like to punish books for simply making choices I wouldn’t make. I try my best to judge a book for what it was attempting to be. With Requiem it is mostly about a single character, a doctor trying to escape earth who gets trapped on Luna until she is hired to be a ship’s doctor.

The story itself is, I assume, smaller than those in the full novellas. A lot of it is simply her getting used to the ship and the people on it. It introduces a few characters, has some good action. And mostly was well written outside of being entirely in present tense, which continued to distract me.

So, while I don’t know that I’ll be rushing to get any more of D.M. Pruden’s books that I read it at all is a testament to his skill as an author and I believe that anyone who doesn’t have a problem with the perspective and the prequel ness of the story and likes science fiction should enjoy it.

You can get this book free at D.M. Pruden’s website