Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.
Had to move this up a day this week, but when the big news hit, you have to be there to discuss it. Back on track now, and in our previous chapter I had to wonder if Jean Lorrah had it in for Amanda since she just keeps giving her the Aunt May treatment.
There are some short chapters in this book. The last one was short and this one is barely four pages. So why does it work here? A timing issue on my part being a coincidence comes to mind. Shorter chapters have been to my benefit. I think the difference is what one does with that page count. I’ve noted it in the Golden Age anthology comic reviews. Some comics just didn’t fit the page count and needed more time to be interesting, while others told a solid and enjoyable story in the same limited amount of pages.
Compare this also to the Op-Center novels or The Black Stallion’s Ghost. In those reviews I complained about the shorter chapters, but nothing seemed to happen, confusing me about the chapter count. Lorrah, on the other hand, has had two scenes at times, and even when not it felt organic for the chapter to end there. The story continued to advance rather than stopping for something mundane with little or no major impact, if any at all. She knows when to make a solid break, which doesn’t help my questions as to how one knows when to chapter break. I guess because I do more comics than prose. The Transformers lore I’m creating for myself has proper stop gaps based on the format of the reports. It’s still something I need to figure out since one of my story ideas might be better suited to prose than comic, but right now the only prose novel I’m thinking about is this one.
So let’s get into it. We’re down on Nisus with McCoy when he learns what’s happened on the Enterprise. We start, however, with noting the chaos going on, the reasons some of the medical staff could get infected, the stress and fatigue that comes with handling so many patients, and how rough it’s been on McCoy even though he hasn’t been there very long. McCoy wants to return to the ship; since the plague’s aboard now he feels he could be more help up there, but Kirk tells him he’s needed there finding a cure. He also confirms for McCoy that Spock’s potential of having a worse reaction to the plague is taken into consideration. It’s stuff we know, while still framing important information we only guessed at or getting a fresh perspective on.
McCoy checks in with Daniel and Sorel, and here’s were we move things forward. They’ve isolated the factor in Klingon blood that might be making them immune. Both McCoy and Sorel have seen it before, but I probably know less about this stuff than the author, presuming she researched this stuff. This is the second time she’s done a story where future space medicine plays a role, and probably more so here, since this is a medical drama story rather than a murder mystery. That similarity may come up later, a different kind of Chekov’s gun, and Chekov’s not even in this story. There are two (or one and a half, depending on your perspective) Klingons up on the ship, which McCoy didn’t know about and his history with Klingons has not been the best so he’s a bit annoyed at first until Sorel reminds him Kirk wouldn’t have done it without reason. Still, Two of our half-Klingons are kids, and three Klingons isn’t going to be enough to cure a planet even if they do make a vaccine.
It’s a short chapter, but unlike other times I’ve complained about that, everything here matters to the character understanding and moving the plot forward. We have good news but still some bad news, since it’s too early in the novel to solve all the problems. We still have the drama involving the connection of mixed species offspring that needs to come into play, and the logicless Vulcan factor to consider. Next time, which will hopefully be back at the usual time, we go back to the ship because I think that’s about to come into play.
