This is my favourite of the Luba and Palomar series so far! It's entirely down to the protagonist. Most of the stories here - not all of them, but a good seventy per cent or so (she says, not having counted but simply giving an impression) - are told from the point of view of Venus, the young daughter of Petra. Venus loves comic books and her little sister, so a lot of the various comics here are... less complex, perhaps, than some of those collected in previous volumes?

I'm not sure less complex is the right phrase. Maybe I'm just getting used to this enormous cast of characters and so am less in need of the cheat sheet in the back telling me who everyone is (and who they're related to), but because the stories are so child-focused, in that Venus herself is narrating them, there's a lot less sex and violence than usual in this series. The adults around Venus and her sister and her younger cousins tend to care about them and look after them, and so anything Venus can glean from their behaviour is not necessarily reliable. Balancing what a child protagonist sees and understands with what the reader sees and understands is a very hard thing to do as a writer, which is why I'm not sure that "less complex" is fair. Either way, I still enjoyed it.