Texas Hold ‘Em

One of the things I like about the Wild Cards universe is how many different types of story it's capable of telling. This particular offering is far from the usual, which to my mind is a plus, but to many readers could be a negative. Compared with what you'd normally expect from Martin (for whatever he has to do with this book specifically), this is entirely devoid of horrible deaths, almost completely lacking in sexual references, and largely upbeat and positive. It's also - and one suspects this is what most people might have a problem with in a superhero story - particularly low stakes.

The core plot concerns a high school jazz band spending a week in San Antonio in order to take part in a national competition. Six stories are woven into this, but they're all directly related to it, mostly introducing new characters to the series as an admittedly implausibly high number of the characters turn out to be secret aces. Or deuces, really, in most cases.

The running theme of the stories is prejudice, because the band that's the focus of it all is made up of jokers. Texas, in this respect, doesn't come out of it very well, being most prominently represented by a bigoted Baptist church, but there are, in fact, a number of more tolerant characters to play against this, most obviously in the final story.

For me, the weakest of the break-out stories is ‘Jade Blossom's Brew', in which a former contestant on American Hero basically acts like a jerk. She is doing it in a good cause towards the end, but up until then, she just seems to be obnoxious for the sake of it, and I didn't get a feel for the character at all. But all of the others worked, dealing with minor dramas along the way and teens breaking the school-imposed curfew along with trying to figure out their place in the world. Of the new characters, the one that I found worked best was the girl with the secret power to control mosquitos; otherwise, it's the returning characters of Bubbles and Jerry Strauss who make the most impression.

This is a standalone book; obviously, there's a lot of backstory to some of the characters, and to the world itself, but it's not really necessary to have read the previous books to make sense of this one On the other hand, it's so different in tone to most of those, even with the strong theme of unjustified prejudice, that it's really not a good place to start. It's a change of pace, something I wouldn't want very often, but that's nice every now and then.