Scan barcode
A review by njdarkish
Redshirts by John Scalzi
3.0
There's two angles from which I come at this book.
One angle is of great pleasure in the ideas of this book. It's a very clever concept, with a fun blend of meta ideas and an intriguing storyline. There's nothing not to like about a fun story, right?
The other angle is focused more on the latter half of the book, especially the codas. Honestly, the latter portion of the main story got ridiculous in a way (that wasn't any more ridiculous than the rest of the book) that stopped being as interesting to me. The first half I was laughing and wanting to see where the story would take me, the latter half I kind of just wanted to finish the book so I could move on to something else. I think the reason why is that the impression I get from this book is that John Scalzi is very in love with his writing and how clever he is. So much so that instead of ending the book with the end of the story, he instead wrote codas in different perspectives (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person) just to show everybody else how clever he is. And I spent so much time thinking about the author that I barely thought about what those parts contributed to the piece as a whole. Does that make any sense? Scalzi's self-adoration drew attention to itself and distracted from what were otherwise interesting parts of the story that had a surprisingly strong emotional component to them.
But yeah, as a whole I liked this book, I don't regret picking it up, but the humor didn't ever elicit more than a chuckle, and the story was fun until it got less fun.
One angle is of great pleasure in the ideas of this book. It's a very clever concept, with a fun blend of meta ideas and an intriguing storyline. There's nothing not to like about a fun story, right?
The other angle is focused more on the latter half of the book, especially the codas. Honestly, the latter portion of the main story got ridiculous in a way (that wasn't any more ridiculous than the rest of the book) that stopped being as interesting to me. The first half I was laughing and wanting to see where the story would take me, the latter half I kind of just wanted to finish the book so I could move on to something else. I think the reason why is that the impression I get from this book is that John Scalzi is very in love with his writing and how clever he is. So much so that instead of ending the book with the end of the story, he instead wrote codas in different perspectives (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person) just to show everybody else how clever he is. And I spent so much time thinking about the author that I barely thought about what those parts contributed to the piece as a whole. Does that make any sense? Scalzi's self-adoration drew attention to itself and distracted from what were otherwise interesting parts of the story that had a surprisingly strong emotional component to them.
But yeah, as a whole I liked this book, I don't regret picking it up, but the humor didn't ever elicit more than a chuckle, and the story was fun until it got less fun.