Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mdpenguin 's review for:
Zoe's Tale
by John Scalzi
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.