{"id":300,"date":"2017-01-26T16:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T23:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=300"},"modified":"2017-09-10T16:18:50","modified_gmt":"2017-09-10T22:18:50","slug":"book-commanding-the-red-lotus-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2017\/01\/26\/book-commanding-the-red-lotus-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK: Commanding the Red Lotus (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><u><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/images.gr-assets.com\/books\/1465689289l\/30104744.jpg\" alt=\"Commanding the Red Lotus\" width=\"318\" height=\"475\" \/>Commanding the Red Lotus<\/u><\/strong><br \/>\nYear: 2016<br \/>\nAuthor: R.J. Sullivan<br \/>\nLength: 236 pages<\/p>\n<p>***THIS BOOK WAS RECEIVED FROM A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY***<\/p>\n<p>Not so much a novel as a collection of three novellas, <em>Commanding the Red Lotus<\/em> is your standard sci-fi space story. Unfortunately, because these novellas are collected together in this way, it feels like an attempt to string them together to make a novel. If this were a novel, it should have started with the third novella and expounded from there. After all, most of the backstory was mentioned or alluded to in this third story, so more pages could have been spent exploring the dynamic of the spacecraft crew. As it stands, there were a lot of characters mentioned that I couldn\u2019t tell you a thing about.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes right down to it, I have two issues with this book. The first is the main character. I feel the main character should have been the pirate captain, mainly because she had such an interesting backstory and an entertaining personality. Instead, the reader is stuck with rich girl Sayuri Arai. I would have much rather Sayuri been a highly educated woman who knew <em>how<\/em> to run a ship\u00a0but kept finding that the realities of doing so were not covered in any textbook. As it stands, Sayuri is just annoyingly incompetent and seems to just get by on sheer luck.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, the choice of making the eponymous vessel a mining ship, and an extremely aged and practically out-of-service one at that, I felt was misguided. The blurb on the cover compared these stories to <em>Firefly<\/em>, and I could see where the comparisons would be made. However, in these moments, the stories felt just like any other clich\u00e9 sci-fi story. If you took away the outer space aspect to this story, it would just be about a mining vessel. I don\u2019t know if I would pick up a book like that\u00a0since it sounds pretty boring (ha ha). Consequently, the size of the crew seemed too big to really get to know each of their characters. The ones we do meet don\u2019t seem to use much logic either, but maybe that\u2019s because of their Commander.<\/p>\n<p>An OK collection of sci-fi novellas with lots of illogical characters, I give <em>Commanding the Red Lotus<\/em> 2.5 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n<h1><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a01\/2<\/strong><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commanding the Red Lotus Year: 2016 Author: R.J. Sullivan Length: 236 pages ***THIS BOOK WAS RECEIVED FROM A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY*** Not so much a novel as a collection of three novellas, Commanding the Red Lotus is your standard sci-fi space story. Unfortunately, because these novellas are collected together in this way, it feels like an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,54],"tags":[9,55,335,336,97,339,338,8,337],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-5-stars","category-book","tag-9","tag-book","tag-commanding-the-red-lotus","tag-firefly","tag-giveaway","tag-goodreads","tag-r-j-sullivan","tag-review","tag-sci-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":737,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions\/737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}