If you’ve ever wondered how heroes feel about finding danger and adventure everywhere they look, about always just happening to be in the right place at the right time to stop the villains and monsters, then A. Lee Martinez’s The Last Adventure of Constance Verity may have some answers for you. In Constance Verity’s case, after having battled enemies since the age of seven and saving the world more times than she can remember, all she really wants now is to have a regular life. Bored of adventure and hankering after peace and quiet, she decides the best thing to do is to find and kill the fairy godmother who blessed – or perhaps cursed – her with her destiny. It’s the obvious answer, surely! As it turns out however, Connie’s fate is rather more complicated than she realised, and there’s a surprisingly large number of people who aren’t so keen on her giving up the adventuring life.
This is an interesting book to discuss, because it deliberately goes big on the fantasy, sci-fi and adventure tropes, gleefully cramming in every last cliché, embracing and subverting them in equal measure. Take Connie herself; think Buffy mixed with Elsa Bloodstone (plus, let’s be fair, bits of every other classic adventure hero/heroine you can think of) and you’ll have a sense of the sort of all-tropes-in-one character that Connie is, and on one level it’s tremendous fun to just watch as this ultimate badass blithely smashes through every obstacle – physical or otherwise – in her way. There’s snarky dialogue a-plenty as she rolls her eyes at yet another grand plan to unleash a monster or destroy the world, while her one real-life friend (Tia) tries to persuade her not to take such drastic action as killing her fairy godmother, and generally gets in the way whenever there’s fighting to be done.
But the tropes and clichés are the point of the book, or rather the way in which Martinez applies them to a character who knows everything about adventuring but basically nothing about being an ordinary person. Knowing and witty, in its own way this book is really about the differences between fiction and the real world – real lives don’t work the way fictional narratives do, they’re messier and much less certain, and that’s a truth that Connie has to find her own way towards. Dinosaurs and aliens and robots are objectively dangerous, but to Connie they’re just familiar and dull. She wants a real life but she also wants the certainty that comes from her adventures – whatever adventures come her way, whatever the risks, she knows what she has to do, but what scares her is figuring out how to have an ordinary life with ordinary relationships, without the comfort of knowing what’s going to happen.
Of course, if the fate of the hero is to always be in the right place at the right time though, what does that mean for their freedom, and their agency? That’s also what Connie is wrestling with here, as she does everything she can to get rid of her destiny only to – inevitably – find herself resignedly battering her way through unhinged cultists, aliens, magical beings, robots, sinister agents, dinosaurs, and all the rest. At times the relentless pace and endless adventuring can feel a touch repetitive, but Martinez largely gets away with it because of how much fun Connie and Tia are to follow (not to mention a couple of particularly enjoyable secondary characters), and because by providing just enough description to give the essentials and nothing more, by concentrating on plot and dialogue and forward motion, he delivers a pulpy adventure story that’s breezy and silly but with just enough depth to make it thought-provoking too.
Many thanks to Jo Fletcher Books and A. Lee Martinez for sending me a copy of The Last Adventure of Constance Verity in exchange for my honest review.
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