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A review by ryanlindbergo
Will Save the Galaxy for Food by Yahtzee Croshaw
3.0
As a fan of Yahtzee's work for about 12 years now, I was excited to finally read one of his books.
Expectations were not met, this was a mixed bag. The ending definitely was the best portion of the book, but the rest is pretty meh.
My biggest problem is that there's this sort of cyclical structure to a large section of the book. A crisis begins to unfold that the charactersget trapped in, stuff gets a little whacky, a speech check happens, crisis is narrowly solved, five seconds pass, and cycle repeats. There's only so much mileage you can get out of that before crisis #6 feels very boring. That's not even to mention the whole "you're Jacques McKeown?" convo comes up basically each time the cycle starts anew.
The other thing that kind of got me was: I don't know if I was getting enough of Yahtzee's "voice" or waaaay too much of it at the same time. Having watched so much Zero Punctuation, I was pretty familiar with his style, so it was so weird when it would float in and out only to crank it back up to 11 a couple of pages later. Seemed real inconsistent.
The ending really wraps it up nicely though. As I write this, literally just having finished, the recency effect may be pushing its thumb heavily on the scale. But it was nice finally getting out of the "crisis cycle" that plagued so much of the book's middle section. The characters have a little agency at the end rather than being hot potatoed between a constant stream of crisis vignettes.
Overall, not what i expected, but I definitely didn't hate it. Hoping the sequel is better.
Expectations were not met, this was a mixed bag. The ending definitely was the best portion of the book, but the rest is pretty meh.
My biggest problem is that there's this sort of cyclical structure to a large section of the book. A crisis begins to unfold that the charactersget trapped in, stuff gets a little whacky, a speech check happens, crisis is narrowly solved, five seconds pass, and cycle repeats. There's only so much mileage you can get out of that before crisis #6 feels very boring. That's not even to mention the whole "you're Jacques McKeown?" convo comes up basically each time the cycle starts anew.
The other thing that kind of got me was: I don't know if I was getting enough of Yahtzee's "voice" or waaaay too much of it at the same time. Having watched so much Zero Punctuation, I was pretty familiar with his style, so it was so weird when it would float in and out only to crank it back up to 11 a couple of pages later. Seemed real inconsistent.
The ending really wraps it up nicely though. As I write this, literally just having finished, the recency effect may be pushing its thumb heavily on the scale. But it was nice finally getting out of the "crisis cycle" that plagued so much of the book's middle section. The characters have a little agency at the end rather than being hot potatoed between a constant stream of crisis vignettes.
Overall, not what i expected, but I definitely didn't hate it. Hoping the sequel is better.