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The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
by Tim Pratt
(Bantam Spectra, $12.00, 402 pages; trade paperback, published November
2005.)
 Tim
Pratt's debut novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, stars
Marzi, a struggling young cartoonist moonlighting in a Santa Cruz café.
The most significant part of her nascent oeuvre is a comic book titled,
like Pratt's novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, the
episodic saga of a young woman who finds a Narnia-like portal to another
universe, where she becomes the gunslinging hero Rangergirl, fighting
supervillains in a primal desert world that blends the mythic US frontier
and ancient Egypt.
Marzi's best friend, Lindsay, is worried. Since her mysterious breakdown,
which led to the creation of Rangergirl, Marzi isn't the girl she used
to be. Lindsay wants to reignite Marzi's love life. At first, Marzi
resists all romantic entanglements. She's comfortable in her self-imposed
isolation. Or is she?
The sexuality, values, and lifestyles of Marzi and her friends reflect
the complexities of contemporary society; they're artists and iconoclasts
changing the world by living life their own idiosyncratic way. Their
casual earnestness is both charming and endearing.
The author, however, is himself perhaps a bit too earnest at times:
his characters occasionally become mouthpieces for his personal likes
and dislikes (this unfortunate habit tends also to manifest itself in
his otherwise fine short fiction), and too much emphasis is put on these
quasi-rants or name-droppings, distracting from the story. But that's
his only misstep.
Pratt has crafted a rollicking adventure -- an imaginative and unusual
blend of superhero comics, classic fantasy, western pulp, and romantic
comedy -- in which the world of Rangergirl infiltrates reality, and
the people around Marzi are possessed by dangerous supernatural entities.
To save everything and everyone she knows, Marzi must emerge from her
shell, investigate the links between the café, Rangergirl, and
her own repressed memories, and ultimately embrace the hero within herself. 
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, 20 May 2006.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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