Not worth my time. Bailed on page 188.
I really enjoyed The Martian, so you might assume that my expectations were too high going into this one. They were not. I was not expecting to love it, but did expect a fun, entertaining ride. Unfortunately it's neither.
The story here is set on a Moon colony called Artemis. We follow the life and times of Jazz Bashara, who is not above breaking that law for cash. One thing leads to another, and soon Jazz is way over her head and her life is at stake. Will she survive? I simply don't care.
I've got so many issues with this one and I'll just jot them down as they occur to me.
1. The writing is mediocre. Honestly, I don't expect lyrical writing, but this is plain awful.
2. The characters are all cardboard cutouts who move across the page. Not one has any depth, or character development. They are simply tools to move the plot from here to there.
3. The plot is ridiculous and boring.
4. Unlike The Martian, there is barely any science or really anything of interest in this story. Also, smelting and welding are not new technologies, so we don't need detailed descriptions of either.
5. Weir cannot write women. At all.
6. Saudis, Vietnamese, and Colombians, oh my! While I think Weir was ticking off as many diversity boxes as he could, he should really stick with what he knows. Every single ethnic group were cliches and clumps of undifferentiated masses that added no texture or value to this story.
7. Like The Martian, this story is told from the first person point of view. The problem is Weir seemed to forget that unlike The Martian, Jazz is not talking to a camera. We are in her head, so when she suddenly looks at/talks to us, the reader, it makes no sense whatsoever.
8. Also, who the hell needs to have Muslim clothing explained in this day and age? Sometimes it's explained in parenthesis after the word, and other times, there's a wiki like explanation. Seriously Weir?
9. It seemed to me that Weir was writing a screenplay, so maybe he should have jettisoned all the additional weight and simply published his screenplay, which might have been a more interesting read.
The only things, and I mean ONLY things I liked about this book were the cover art and the Kenyan connection. The rest is absolute rubbish. Rating: 1 star.
150. Journal Sparks: Fire Up Your Creativity with Spontaneous Art, Wild Writing, and Inventive Thinking
There are indeed lots of ideas to help you fill out those blank pages, but there's nothing new here for me. It is very colorful and bright, and while it's not labeled as a young adult book, I think kids as young as 10 might find this a fun and useful book. If you are a person who has never kept a journal, would like to, and have no idea where to start, this might be the book for you. Rating: 2 stars.
151. Hercule Poirot's Christmas: A Holiday Mystery (Hercule Poirot #20)
"You have said that Christmas is a season of good cheer. That means, does it not, a lot of eating and drinking? It means, in fact, the overeating! And with the overeating, there comes indigestion And with the indigestion there comes the irritability!" - M. Poirot.
"How dreadful that the holidays should begin with a wailing scream and a deathly gurgle!" - The New York Times.
This is the story of a family that gets together for the Christmas holiday, so I thought it would be perfect for some seasonal reading while having a snow event in these parts. It's a cozy murder with lots of blood, a locked house scenario, lots of characters with questionable motives who lie about everything, and twists and turns that I did not see coming. It was a good thing indeed that M. Poirot was in the neighborhood to help sort it all out.
For those of you visiting with family this holiday season, I'll pass along this warning from M. Poirot:
"The result of pretending to be a more amiable, a more forgiving, a more high-minded person than one really is, has sooner or later the effect of causing one to behave as a more disagreeable, a more ruthless and an altogether more unpleasant person than is actually the case! If you dam the stream of natural behaviour, mon ami, sooner or later the dam bursts and a cataclysm occurs!" Rating: 3 stars.
152. Thornhill
Book blurb: Parallel stories set in different times, one told in prose and one in pictures, converge as a Ella unravels the mystery of the girl next door.
I really liked the format of this novel. In the 1982 timeline the story of Mary unfolds via her diary entries, and in the 2016 timeline the story of Ella is told as a wordless graphic novel. The story alternates between these two perspectives with lots of black pages in between. The Thornhill Institute for Children is the backdrop against which these stories unfold.
This is a beautifully designed book, and I especially loved the illustrations which wonderfully evoke the dark mood of the tale. I was less impressed with the text/diary sections, but that might be because of the age group this is written for. The themes explored are all important ones, and I enjoyed the juxtaposition of these two girls and their stories. 4 stars for the art, 2 stars for the writing.
This horror graphic novel/diary mashup is targeted for 8-12 year old readers, and while I didn't find it scary, it might work really well for the intended age group. Rating: 3 stars.
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