Zoe’s Tale
On to the last book which talks about John Perry and Jane Sagan. This book was written after a lot of complaints about The Last Colony, where an important plot point seemed to be resolved via Deus ex Machina. In John Scalzi’s head, everything seemed fine, but after enough complaints, he decided to write this book to address those complaints. I must admit that when I read The Last Colony, that part seemed a bit too conveniently hand-wavy, but it didn’t detract too much from the plot (I mean, Scalzi almost never kills his heroes), and the reason you read a Scalzi book, where its mostly about the dialouge, the smart ass characters, and maybe a crazy plots or three.
This book is…not great. The problem is mostly that he’s trying to write from the POV of a 16 year old teenager, who’s going through her first love, her first bff, her first colonization on a brand new planet while being the bait for the mysterious conclave, and of course, her first realization that being the human-god of an entire race of being actually means something.
For the most part, I guess the teenager dialogues are fine, she’s sarcastic and has lots of wits, and does lots of stupid things, and is probably a bit too mature as a 16 year old, but its mostly just fine. I think its mostly that the rest of the cast isn’t that interesting. Her BFF isn’t a great counterpoint like Jane is to John in The Last Colony, her boyfriend is also similarly too much out of the picture, so we end up with a lot of monologue, and I think that’s what ultimately makes the book just not all that interesting.
This is probably a skip, but if you’ve read the 3 other books in the Old Man War’s series, you might as well finish this tale of John And Jane’s kid. Its also really disappointing that it doesn’t end at the same place as the other book, it almost feels like Scalzi did not have as much fun writing this book either.