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3.73 AVERAGE

adventurous emotional funny reflective sad tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Should have stopped at book three.

Completely unnecessary retelling of The Last Colony from a different character.

3.5
adventurous emotional funny tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This was delightful and now I can't wait for Zoe to read it. Ronnie too, and also Justin but yeah.
adventurous emotional funny medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

It's weird to say that a book that made me laugh out loud and get chocked up as much as this one did is merely decent, but I have to. The problem is that I found Zoe's character to be too incongruous and hard to believe. Let me say that I have no problem with a Mary Sue and have no idea why people do -- I love competence porn and see no reason that the super-competent person can't be a woman -- but if you're going to write someone who is absurdly beyond the limits of a normal person, you need to be consistent about it. I guess you wouldn't really call Zoe a Mary Sue, but she's impossibly precocious with an EIQ beyond anything you could expect from the wisest of adults through most of the book except when the narrative works better for her to behave like the teenager she is. And that happens just often enough to make it hard to suspend disbelief for the rest of the time. I mean, yeah, teenagers are like that but not THAT much like that. And I didn't find her developmental journey to be particularly compelling. She's basically the same person through most of it until towards the end her mother kind of hints that she could take more charge of her life and suddenly she's large and in charge and a super-leader. 


Like I said, though, I laughed a lot and some parts were really moving. And, more to the point, it's worth reading for the gaps that it fills in from the Last Colony (especially explaining the deus ex machina when Zoe came back from visiting the Conclave), which it does really well. But with all of that, I sometimes thought about DNFing it because I found the teenage drama uninteresting and not entirely believable and the whole thing where I couldn't believe in the character whose perspective I was reading from. When I wasn't debating putting it down, though, I couldn't put it down because it really was an entertaining and interesting story. 

I wasn't sure how I was going to like a retelling of the last book from the perspective of Zoe, but I enjoyed it. The last few chapters added a new dimension to the story that I hadn't gotten from book 3, and I liked the focus on her relationship with the Obin. This has been a great series thus far (book #2, the Ghost Brigades, being my favorite) and I hope we still get to see some appearance from John, Jane, and Zoe in the final volumes.

This is basically a re-telling of an earlier story from a unique perspective--the daughter of the protagonists from the other story. ([b:The Last Colony|88071|The Last Colony (Old Man's War, #3)|John Scalzi|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312021759s/88071.jpg|18279847])

The book is good, but main character (Zoe) is a little too perfect for a teenage girl. Even her missteps feel like plot devices not really things that a teenage girl would do. However, it was interesting and fun to read and maybe more so if you haven't read the previous book very recently.

I wasn’t a huge fan of this book.

It was well written and I like Zoe as a character but I didn’t love reliving the same events as the last book.

This was written to fix the ending of Last Colony and it did great. I loved the extra story to fix that ending but it’s unfortunate that the first 75% of the story is the same events with a different perspective.

I understand why someone would like this book but it was kind of boring reading 75% of the same book for a good ending.