Reviews

The Unfixed Stars by Michael Byers

auntblh's review against another edition

2.0

I started this one but I gave up after about a 100 pages. I was hoping for more story about the discovery of Pluto but all I was getting was a lot of back story. I wasn't sure who these people were or how they would be part of the story. I found I didn't really care to stick around to find out. The writing style was off for me; there were times that I was pulled out of the story to re-read some sentences/paragraphs to try to figure out what was being said. I really wanted to like this but was disappointed instead.

runkefer's review against another edition

4.0

Really enjoyed this fictional account of the discovery of Pluto. Richly-drawn characters in pursuit of chimerical goals, burdened by their eccentricities and society's judgement of them, all come together in the Arizona desert.

janessat's review against another edition

2.0

This book was a huge disappointment. It took until half way through to tie together the random stories and had hardly any of the science I was hoping for when I checked it out. There's so much melodrama, exacerbated by the audio book reader's flair for the dramatic. Would not recommend.

doubleinfinity's review against another edition

2.0

J: This book became reeaaallly hard to care about.
also the author doesn't write any non-straight male character well.

diana_reads_and_reads's review against another edition

4.0

This was a slow read, but not a bad one. There were a lot of weird side stories going on, at least one of which I don’t really know how it connected to the main tale. But it was a worthwhile, interesting read for the most part. It was on track to be a five star read until about the last 100 pages. The way some of the side stories were wrapped up was just…odd. I really enjoyed Byers’ writing style. Going back to read other goodreads reviews, it looks like people either love or hate this one.

I’m looking forward to reading How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming as a nonfiction pairing to this book. Definitely some of the doubts about Pluto are planted in Percival’s Planet.

a_l_deleon's review against another edition

3.0

Difficult to follow until about halfway through, Percival's Planet wasn't what I expected. I did learn some things of the history on how Pluto came to be discovered, but I didn't feel the story tugged at me. The author's strongest writing was in the dialogue, so I may visit other works by him to see how well he does with other novels, but this one fell short of the mark for me.