"The Notorious Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

Well, we're back in the land of relatively good books again, everyone. (At least for a bit. I'm not sure if my luck will hold.)

 

Basically, it's about a couple of late-teens outlaws (Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne, because we had to have our color-names theme) who wander around in dystopian post-apocalyptic England robbing the rich to feed the poor (at Albert's insistence; giving Scarlett money is a good way for that money to find its way into an unknown void). They're pretty much your classic fighter-and-mage duo; Scarlett is good with guns and pretty much any other weapons you hand her, and Albert has various apocalypse-induced anomalous powers like reading minds and occasionally telekinesis (in stressful moments).

The book kicks off with the pair of them breaking into the underground treasure vault of a not!church run by le badguys. (More on them later). It continues with them trying to escape le badguys (henceforth the not-Inquisition) and some other villains (I'll call them the not-Mafia) as they try to get at the main characters for various nefarious reasons. The not-Inquisition apparently has been collecting up psions like Albert to... I don't actually know what they want with Albert and the rest of the psions. Buuuut they keep throwing this one guy at Albert, and by extension Scarlett because she's connected to Albert and doesn't have enough caution to not pick fights with edgy weirdos.

There's also a bunch of stuff with a |sunken city| that the not-Inquisition controls and the not-Mafia wants to loot. So, naturally, our main characters get sent there by Scarlett's friends/contacts/handlers/nemeses in the not-Mafia.

As promised, more on the not-Inquisition. At first glance, these guys seem like a textbook example of Organized Religion Is Evil™. However, while that normally feels like a cheap stab at Christianity, these guys (well, their parent organization) are more like universalists. ("Evil organized universalists" isn't a phrase you hear every day, is it?) Since my stance on universalism is "wouldn't it be nice, but unfortunately it doesn't work like that," this doesn't bother me as much.

Also, these guys aren't even good at universalism. It's hard to be bad at something that's basically the Calvinball of religion, but they manage it. It's like if they looked at the medieval/Renaissance Catholic church and said, "What if this, but universalist." So on the one hand, they're even terrible at heresy; on the other hand, they're basically running most of dystopian post-apocalyptic England via the not-Inquisition and executing people for defying them.

Yep. This has been Silly Songs with Larry a long-winded explanation of why despite its villain being of a type that I don't usually like, I rate this book 4 stars.

And were it a videogame, I'd rate it: A very stern T for content: swearing. (Man, it's nice to be doing a content warning that's just swearwords. I used to think those were all Inappropriate Content that adults talked about.) It's mostly traditional and/or British-specific language; I can think of maybe one instance anyone uses a modern obscenity, and that one's fairly mild.

(Endnote: I rather liked that the two title characters have a completely platonic friendship. That was nice. Although, I looked back, and most of the books I've been reviewing have had pretty much no romance in them? Maybe it's just the expectation that when your protagonists [or protagonist and deuteragonist] are a boy and a girl, they'll obviously get together or at least liiiiike each other? If you have any thoughts on that, let me know.)