Personal reflections on Rocket Raccoon and Groot: Steal the Galaxy!

Guardians of the Galaxy: Rocket Racoon & Groot Steal The Galaxy by Dan Abnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you're like me--where you like comics, but you love books--this crossover novel will be a great find. Marvel characters in original novels! Love it.

A digression
I remember when I was a kid, we had a Fantastic Four book. It was one of those "big little books," where it was short and fat and had a picture on every other page but was a legit book. I loved being able to read a comic book story filled with some of my favorite characters, on my own, at my own pace, supplying most of my own pictures. I read that book a bunch of times.
The Fantastic Four: The House of Horrors

About the same time, we had a "Get Smart" novel, which somehow was more fun than the goofy TV show. TV is all dialogue, but a novel has narration, which makes the story seem more real to me, and filled in so much that was missing. I don't know where that one book came from, or why we didn't get more. Should have.
Missed It By That Much!

And my favorite novel of this sort (crossover from another medium) that we had when I was a kid was Alan Dean Foster's novelization of "Star Wars." I loved the movie, but in some ways preferred the book. It had scenes that were missing from the movie, which was cool, but what affected me the most was the narration: the lingering on crucial events that occurred in a second in the movie but filled a paragraph in the book, or a page; the revelation of the characters' thoughts and motivations; the explanation and description of technology; the backstory and connections. The movie was two dimensions, but the novel was in three. Or so it seemed.
Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker

TL:DR
This "original novel of the Marvel universe" is in the same vein, and I liked it. It is a straight-up comic book adventure, but it's more fun (for me, a book nerd) to enjoy it in novel format. The author employs an excellent smart-ass tone, supplies helpful exposition, uses a variety of settings and secondary characters, and keeps the saving-of-the-galaxy plot moving along with as much energy as a comic or movie. It is very much pulp fiction, with all that implies, except for shoddy writing; Dan Abnett is an excellent writer who knows the characters and universe very well. So, I suppose, this is high quality pulp, which I mean neither as an oxymoron (a lot of pulp is well-written) nor a criticism. Pulp is entertaining; pulp is imaginative; pulp doesn't make a lot of demands on a reader; pulp, more than anything is fun, which is what I want most from reading.

If you're not put off by your comic book characters showing up in your paperbacks, and you like novels to be fun, maybe even silly, you should take a look. I think you'll enjoy it.

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