Big Damn Hero

Firefly is forever going to be the greatest series cancelled before finishing its first season. The cult following that this show has maintained despite its abbreviated time on air and incomplete story arc is amazing. I am a big fan of the show and have been constantly on the lookout for stories that give the same feel. Imagine my delight in learning that there is a series of books now being published continuing on from where the show left off?

Big Damn Hero came with high expectations. Jumping in it feels very much like it could be the working of a new episode in the main show - we meet familiar characters in familiar places (ie Badger is back and we are back on Persephone). That familiarity definitely gives a warm feeling to the heart of those of us who loved the show.

There are however a few issues. As always, when someone new takes over the writing of something it can take a while to find the groove of some of the characters personalities. Whilst not horribly jarring, some of the characters came of slightly jarring here - without the actors to imprint there own personalities over the written ones I feel this was slightly inevitable. There is also an issue with the Hollywood ending. That just does not feel especially Firefly. The whole point was that these guys are not really heroes.

Otherwise the plot was fine - rehashing old war stories of Mal is always going to be entertaining, but it lacked the whimsicality and moral greyness of the best of Firefly. This is an entertaining read and for fans of the show you should definitely check it out. I am not sure how people approaching this without knowing the show would get on though. The story is entertaining enough, but not the best that we have seen from Mal and the gang. I do look forward to more books in this series though!

I waffled between giving this 3 or 4 stars. But since most of it was 4 star, and only the ending making me think it should get 3, I went with 4. This was a lot better than I had expected. Novelizations are not usually that good in my opinion. The author has the characters' voices down well, and my only complaint for the first 36 chapters was too many callbacks to the show in the beginning. I was interested in the story and in finding out what would happen next. But then the ending happened. It didn't feel genuine in a lot of ways, and I thought several characters acted out of character. I think it needed another draft and some revision. Overall, if you like Firefly and like adaptations, I think you would enjoy this for the most part, but I was let down by the last 2 chapters.

I love Book so much, ugh, he's great. And Inara. Pretty much everyone except Jayne, but I feel like that's everyone's read.
The characterization in these books is great. I will say I liked the other Firefly novel I've read better. I wanna say that's just because I encountered it first, but I like the whole gang being together, rather than being split up and chaotic. They can be chaotic together just as well.

I kind of can't believe how much I disliked this book.

I will admit to being a huge Firefly/Serenity fan, so perhaps my expectations were too high. But this story felt like a pastiche, with familiar names and places jumbled together. I get the impulse to want to use elements that fans are comfortable with (Badger! Persephone! The store where Kaylee's dress came from! Jayne's hat!), but this story added nothing to the universe. It felt so rehashed I legitimately think it might possible to do this story as an episode simply by cutting and pasting together clips from the existing show and movie.

The writing is stilted (“[Inara] tried to think of a word to encapsulate how she personally felt about him. She didn't know if there was one. What was going on between her and Mal was too complicated for a single descriptor. It was a tangled knot of inhibitions and unspoken emotions which they themselves might never get around to unraveling.”), and while I know a lot of the character work on the show was nonvocal, there are subtler ways to deal with such things in literature.

If you're looking for new adventures of Serenity, I highly recommend Stephen Brust's unauthorized novel, “My Own Kind of Freedom.” Though it's technically non-canon and only fan fiction, it's a much more honest telling of a story in the Firefly universe. I hope the other planned novels take their cues from it rather than this.