This is a love story. This is a story about fathers and sons. This is a story about families. This is a story about war and peace. This is a story about tree spaceships and magic aliens and talking cats.
Volume 1 of Saga introduced us to all the characters: Marko and Alana and their newborn child, who are being hunted as traitors and miscegenators across the universe by both sides of a never-ending galactic war; killer for hire The Will and his truth-telling cat; and Prince Robot IV, a walking TV set and prince of the Robot Nation, who has been tasked by the Robot royal family with hunting down Alana and Marko before he is allowed to come home to his own wife and unborn child.
If the first volume sets the stage, this one brings the players together and gives you an idea of where the story will be going from here. Marko and Alana on their spaceship, where Hazel will spend her childhood. And who shows up but her grandparents, Marko’s mother and father, who are to say the least, shocked to find that their son has reproduced with the enemy. This was my favorite storyline in the book. I fell in love with Marko’s father, Barr, who has some great bonding scenes with Alana and baby Hazel, as Marko and his mother are off rescuing their ghost babysitter (long story, involves a giant’s balls). Interspersed with present day events are flashbacks to how Marko and Alana met, which involves him being a shirtless prisoner, and her reading a romance novel which is secretly a pacifist manifesto in disguise. It’s wonderful.
The Will’s story is intriguing, too, as Marko’s ex-fiance Gwendolyn joins up with him, and together they rescue Slave Girl from the first book, which forces The Will out of his mourning for his dead lover/ex-partner, the Stalk. And then there’s Prince Robot (whose TV screen shows some weird weird stuff sometimes), who believes that Alana and Marko will be heading to meet the author of the book that brought them together.
This volume was just as good as the first one. I can’t wait to see where this story ends up.
