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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
emotional
funny
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
adventurous
fast-paced
About a hundred pages of this, that covered gaps in the previous book, were good. The rest was pretty tiresome. Probably because it was a recap of the previous book (this on purpose—but still) I am glad Scalzi did not continue down the YA route.
adventurous
emotional
funny
sad
tense
fast-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:
Yes
adventurous
reflective
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:
Yes
http://librarianaut.com/2012/05/18/book-review-zoes-tale/
It was too repetitive vs. the previous books, and too YA yet inauthentically so. I don’t think Scalzi has the teenage girl voice
I'm not big on re-reading books because my TBR pile is big enough as it is, but I feel like I just got tricked into doing so with this one. This fourth book in this series... just re-tells the same story from the third book, almost scene-for-scene, just from a different character's perspective. Maybe it's just because I don't tend to read book series in general, but this feels like a strange approach to me?
Granted, there was a suspiciously convenient deus ex machina moment towards the end of the previous book, and now we finally get an explanation on exactly what happened because we follow the character responsible for it. Kinda wish we didn't need to re-hash all the previous events from the same starting point to learn all that though. Maybe it's for the best that it's been several real-world months since I've read the previous book because I imagine I would've been more frustrated tackling these back-to-back.
In a vacuum, it's a fine piece of sci-fi with literal aliens and scheming and diplomacy, but it did read like YA because our protagonist this round was a literal teenage girl. And to his credit, the author does mention in the acknowledgements that this was a difficult book to write, specifically because he felt that he had already written it (and I as a reader felt like I had already read it). Taken as part of the larger whole however, I'd probably tell people not to feel bad if they skipped this one.
Granted, there was a suspiciously convenient deus ex machina moment towards the end of the previous book, and now we finally get an explanation on exactly what happened because we follow the character responsible for it. Kinda wish we didn't need to re-hash all the previous events from the same starting point to learn all that though. Maybe it's for the best that it's been several real-world months since I've read the previous book because I imagine I would've been more frustrated tackling these back-to-back.
In a vacuum, it's a fine piece of sci-fi with literal aliens and scheming and diplomacy, but it did read like YA because our protagonist this round was a literal teenage girl. And to his credit, the author does mention in the acknowledgements that this was a difficult book to write, specifically because he felt that he had already written it (and I as a reader felt like I had already read it). Taken as part of the larger whole however, I'd probably tell people not to feel bad if they skipped this one.
adventurous
emotional
funny
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No