Big Damn Hero

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.