*NEW RELEASE SPECIAL* Review of NETGALLEY arc The Monster MASH – Book 1 of the Monster M*A*S*H series by Angie Fox #BrainfluffNETGALLEYbookreview #TheMonsterMASHbookreview

It was the premise of this one that caught my eye. Having been a huge fan of the TV series MASH back in the 1970s, seeing references to Hawkeye and Hot Lips stopped me in my tracks. And then it was a no-brainer to pick this one up.

BLURB: Ancient gods. Modern war. And a star-crossed couple who could use some divine intervention.

The day I was drafted into the army of the gods, all I knew about being a MASH surgeon was what I’d learned from Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan. Now here I am, Dr. Petra Robichaud, in the middle of an immortal war, assigned to a MASH camp with a nosy sphinx, a vegetarian werewolf, and an uptight vampire who really needs to get a life. At least they’re all too busy with their own dramas to discover my secret: I can see the dead. It’s a forbidden gift, one that can get me killed, so I haven’t told a soul.

Until the arrestingly intense Galen arrives on my operating table, half-dead and totally to-die-for. When his spirit tries to slip out of his fatally wounded body, I impulsively slip it back in. Call it a rash resurrection. One I’ll live to regret…

REVIEW: This is definitely a quirky, unusual fantasy book, set within a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital where Petra Robichaud works as a surgeon. The catch is that the MASH unit is located near a tarpit in Limbo and the war is a never-ending one. A fair number of the patients they are treating are immortal, which poses its own problems, apparently. If you don’t get to them quickly, bones set at wrong angles and massive injuries can have organs healing into peculiar shapes, or unable to function exactly as they were intended. Such is the life of a surgeon dealing with immortals, among other types of soldiers…

She shares her tent with a depressed werewolf, who is missing his family horribly and a perpetually annoyed vampire, who gets very fed up when he emerges from his coffin to discover his cuff links have been used to fix a tear in the canvas. As in the old TV show, while the overall setting has the capacity to be utterly grim, the madcap humour the medics use to keep themselves sane is used within this book. Fox has re-issued this one to feature more on the humour – and I think her instincts were spot on. I couldn’t have got to the end if it had been a miserable ansty read, all about Petra’s personal tragedy.

As it is, we learn what makes her quite so grouchy about two-thirds through what is essentially a romance. Though the ongoing story of the war and the big game-changer that suddenly makes it far more critical to be on the winning side does play a major part in the ongoing narrative. Overall, I enjoyed the originality of the story and I thought that most of the time, the developing love story was handled well, though towards the end it did get just a tad mushy for my taste. But bear in mind, I generally enjoy my romances as a side dish, rather than the main course. Recommended for fantasy fans looking for something a bit different. While I obtained an arc of The Monster MASH from the publishers via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
8/10