After reading Weir’s breakout work, The Martian , I looked forward to his next novel, Artemis, with rapt anticipation. The scientist in me appreciated how Weir made a realistic setting with realistic science an approachable and entertaining endeavor. The writer in me liked how he kept the tension throughout the plot of The Martian at a consistent level. Consequently, I had high hopes for Artemis and wondered if he could outdo himself (or at least match his previous success) considering how highly regarded The Martian ended up being for him.
Between the two books, Weir seems to have created a style that consists of three elements: accurate science, event-driven plot, and a racially diverse cast of characters. In Artemis, we now find ourselves on the moon, where a colony has been created and sustained for a few decades. Weir conveys the science involved with such a feat naturally and realistically. The exploration of this science is usually through the string of “oh shoot”
events that occur throughout the plot. Finally, with an Arab woman as the main protagonist of the story, supported by a Kenyan man, Ukranian scientist, and her father.
Despite these three elements creating an exciting story, the impact of Artemis felt less than that of The Martian. In The Martian, the driving force of the plot is the survival from isolation. Artemis has a different survival:
avoiding homelessness. Additionally, while Mark Watney was a scientist and astronaut who could “science his way” out of his predicament, Jasmine was a little more “working class” who seemed to jury rig stuff together just because that’s the only way she knew how. Of course, being more “working class,” the profanity seemed a lot more prevalent in Jasmine’s speech than in Mark’s. Both books had profanity; it just seemed like Artemis overdid it.
An Andy Weir book that doesn’t quite live up to The Martian, I give Artemis 4.0 stars out of 5.
Saucer is an amazing Sci-Fi, Adventure, Thriller, and suspense book.
Stephen Coonts is a very talented Author who uses very good word choice. This is quite evident in his Saucer Trilogy, he seems to use the best wording at the best possible time. This book is definitely a great choice for all 13+ year old Audiences. Young Rip Cantrell is put under difficult circumstances numerous times. When his life and the life of Ex-Air Force Test Pilot Charlie Pine, and his grandfather are at stake, he makes a choice that will change his life from that point on. This Novel brings not only the thrill of life and death so many times, but amazing science fiction story line for us Sci Fi geeks. Obviously this book involves a saucer, Hence the name "Saucer", and this saucer appears to be lodged in that sandstone for over 140,000 years.
Now this saucer isn't made from man, as proven when Rip and his companions explore the object after days of digging it out. Over the course of this book, action escalates quickly, as Rip ends up across the world in Australia trying to save Charlie from the 2nd richest man in the world... Saucer is a stunning, action filled, adventurous book, at what might have been and what be. Go check this book out for yourself! I guarantee you will not be disappointed!
They're attacking our vessel Captain! Those savages want to kill us!", "Leave me Conciel! Save yourself my friend!". No doubt these few short phrases from the amazing novel strikes great interest in your mind. 20,000 leagues under the sea is an Adventure Fiction novel written by Jules Verne, and is by far 1 of the best books I have ever read. Professor Aronnax and his faithful servant Consiel board american frigate Abraham Lincoln to embark on a long journey back to France. On the way though, they spot a creature, a monster unlike anyone has ever seen up until that point. After a fierce battle with that monster Pierre Aronnax, Consiel, and a Canadian Harpooner are thrown overboard their frigate lost in the middle of the Vast Atlantic.
Later refuge is found aboard a metal island... Wait? Metal Island? In the middle of the atlantic? Something isn't right. Alast Captain Nemo and his crew surface the mighty vessel and capture Aronnax and his companions.
Sometime later Pierre and his companions alike, awake in a small, pitch black room, not knowing what had happened, or what is about to. Want to find out what happens next? Well go and find this book for yourself! Getting stuck underneath an iceberg in the antarctic! Battling 1 of earths mightiest creatures! Experience the great suspense, action, and adventure this novel brings to you!
Reviewer: 9th Grade
If ever there was proof that not every book should have a trilogy, it’s The Death Cure. Sure, The Maze Runner was an interesting concept, but it brought up a lot of questions. None of these questions were answered by the end of the series since most of the focus was on random action sequences rarely driven by the main characters’ actions. If action wasn’t the focus, then the loose and unbelievable “love triangle” certainly was. In the end, I had no connection to the characters, which was why I was mostly unaffected by some of their deaths.
The real problem with The Death Cure (as well as its predecessor, The Scorch Trials ), is how much “fluff” is in the story. The Maze Runner worked because there was a concrete objective: escape the maze. In the two books that followed, what was the goal? Was it to defeat WICKED? If it was, then the characters didn’t seem too committed to it, since they kept having to deal with obstacles that randomly put themselves in their path. Consequently, the second and third parts of this trilogy could have probably been cut down into one book and saved the reader some time.
Unlike most trilogies, which provide at least some semblance of closure, The Death Cure leaves all its questions unanswered and merely tries to tack on an ending as a Band-Aid. This hand-waving approach was unsatisfying because we still don’t know why running immune subjects through a deadly maze would lead to a cure. We don’t know what the greavers (or any of the other “faceless enemies”) are, or what their purpose was. We don’t know why Teresa was so illogical and vague. Its series like this (which are only popular due to the “Young Adult” craze) that confirm my bias against this “cash-grab” genre.
An unsatisfying end to a trilogy that should have been one book, I give The Death Cure 1.5 stars out of 5.
The main concept behind Notes from the Internet Apocalypse is interesting: one day, the internet just stops working. All the computers and phone lines still work, but the internet has just gone missing. The story that results should be considered a satire since I hardly believe people who have hidden behind a veil of anonymity for so long will do the same deplorable things in real life just to get their “internet fix.” Bringing the reality of our connected society to its extreme logical conclusion in a world without internet, Notes from the Internet Apocalypse is a harsh mirror of what we’ve become, even to the point of cringing at it.
I was a little taken aback by the amount of vulgar language, overt sexuality, and lack of common decency by the characters in this book. Of course, in a book about the internet, these types of people run rampant. If I were one to include animated gif memes in my reviews, I’d likely insert the Arrested Development “I Don’t Know What I Expected” one at this juncture. Yes, the internet is mostly pornography, and the rest seems to be filled with trolls who comment on news articles and YouTube videos, but I doubt these people would resort to acting out their internet lives in real life.
In the end, I had kind of hoped the subtle undertone of addiction was the focus of this book. With the main character who’s clearly alcoholic (even to the amusing point of calling Jameson’s Irish Whiskey “scotch”), and supporting characters who are either addicted to recreational drugs or sex, I wanted the satire of the book to focus on our addictive personalities as a culture, merely perpetuated and sustained via the ever-present internet. As it is, the ending wasn’t quite satisfying enough, providing a preachy bumper sticker to get readers to tune in to the next volume in this series.
An interesting concept that highlights the lowest common denominator, I give Notes from the Internet Apocalypse 2.5 stars out of 5.
Faraway McCarthy was born to be a time traveler. Literally. His mother, Empra McCarthy, had him in the midst of a time traveling journey of her own and he was born outside of time. Currently, he's the #1 cadet at the time traveling training school and is looking forward to a career as illustrious as his mother's. But then his final exam is sabotaged, and he's unceremoniously kicked out of school. When a black market smuggler approaches him with the opportunity to recruit his own crew and travel to the past to steal ancient artifacts, Far takes the offer.
This was pure fun - I love heists and time travel shenanigans, and this had both. While it is a longer book, the fast pacing and well drawn characters make this a relatively quick read. Each member of the crew has at least one chapter written from their perspective, and I really enjoyed getting to know them all, particularly Imogen (Far's snarky but kind cousin). They are a somewhat diverse, fun group, and their strong friendships and healthy relationships were a joy to read about. Are any of the concepts or plot points particularly novel? Nope, but it didn't matter, because the cast and the story are just that fun.
In addition to the crew committing heists, there are other mysterious elements in the form of another time traveler who appears out of nowhere on a job (on the Titanic!) as well as in the mystery of where (when?) Empra is - she went out on a mission when Far was quite young and never came back. The reveals of both mysteries are pretty great, and I honestly didn't see either coming.
Also, and this cannot be stressed enough, but the crew of the Invictus has a pet and it is a RED PANDA (!!!) named Saffron. So much cuteness.
As it's not exactly a novel concept, I think this books screams for comparison (Doctor Who seems inevitable), but I would almost think of this more like an entirely human time traveling version of the Guardians of the Galaxy. I read it when I was suffering from reading fatigue, and it was a total refresher. I really liked it! 4 stars.
Just like Xenocide before it, Children of the Mind is difficult to separate from the previous books in the Ender’s Game series. In fact, Xenocide and Children of the Mind are considered by Orson Scott Card to merely be two parts of the same book, separated at a point in the plot that makes sense.
Even further to the point, I would consider Children of the Mind the last “part” of a story that stretches across four books. While it was easy to take Ender’s Game by itself, every additional piece of the story needs the previous parts for it to have the full impact of what Card was trying to accomplish.
What’s most interesting about this series is how each book has a different focus, almost putting them in distinct genres. Ender’s Game was militaristic sci-fi, while Speaker of the Dead was more along the lines of a mystery. And while Xenocide was the philosophical heart of the series, Children of the Mind was almost a romance in comparison. I appreciated the loose strings and sub-plots being tied up by the end of Children of the Mind, especially when it came to defining the relationships between the characters I had come to know over the last few books.
Even though the basic plot of these last three books was a simple “avoid destruction” motif, the complexity of the whole scenario did require the amount of text dedicated to it. Each element of these stories came into play in some fashion to create a satisfying ending. I’m still in awe of the technological foresight and brilliant solutions to fundamental physics limitations that Card was able to develop in these four books. I rarely have found a series that has been so consistently good across all parts of its story, and I believe the saga of Ender Wiggin is now my new favorite.
A satisfying ending to an incredible series of books, I give Children of the Mind 5.0 stars out of 5.
Much like authors Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were well ahead of their time in their science fiction writing, Orson Scott Card once again shows that he understood some of the key concepts of our universe. Written in 1991, Card’s Xenocide deepens and furthers the continuing adventure of Ender Wiggin that he began back in Ender’s Game . Picking up where Speaker for the Dead left off, Xenocide adds a powerful adversary while also tying plot points back to the first book in the series. In this sense, the tight intertwining of Xenocide with its predecessors makes it difficult to separate and review by itself.
I appreciate what Card has done by creating a multi-book narrative that requires the reader to have started from the very beginning of the story.
While Xenocide is not nearly the end of the series, as made clear by the astounding twist near the end, it does pull enough unresolved threads from Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead to create the next segment of the story. In this sense, the whole story is a multi-book epic so well-written that no detail or specific piece of continuity is overlooked. Plus, with so much history behind it, Xenocide reads at a frenetic pace, just trying to “beat the clock” of an almost assured planetary destruction.
Surprisingly, if you told me that there was a sci-fi book comprised almost entirely of dialogue and profound, philosophical arguments, I would probably assume it was boring (or at least written by Robert Heinlein). And yet, Card has brought the reasoning proposed in the previous books of this series and pulled them through to their logical conclusions, creating an engaging discussion of artificial intelligence and sentience, while wrapping the whole thing in the context of moral arguments for and against exterminating an entire species. There are no easy answers in this book, but Card has masterfully included concepts like cloud computing, interdimensional travel, and genetic engineering to get his point across.
A fantastic continuation of Ender Wiggin’s story that leaves the reader begging for more, I give Xenocide 5.0 stars out of 5.
The book Stranger, by Rachel Brown, tells of a post-apocalyptic town called Las Anclas and its citizens. The people in the world have been affected by a solar storm, which has caused them and the environment to develop mutations called "The Change." These effects can either harm or benefit the people.
The story is told through the perspectives of many other characters, and it gives a lot of insight and information on the characters pasts and thought.
This allows for excellent foreshadowing, which is one of the biggest strengths in the book. The novel describes the dystopian world mainly through the eyes of a young teenage boy named Ross Juarez, which develops the plot, romances, and details of the town and its people well. The book also places action nice and evenly throughout the story, so that it can focus on the story telling and background of the town and characters in other parts.
Overall, the book Stranger has been one of my favorite reads, and I'd recommend it to people who like dystopian worlds, action, and adventure books.
Grade: 8
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a book about the horrors of creating life. The book succeeds in developing most of the sidecharacters. You learn in depth about all of their pasts, and the story fits together well. The tragic plot line of the book shows how the decisions made by Frankenstein, the creator of the monster, comes back to haunt him. It almost becomes a game of cat and mouse when Frankenstein chases around his creation for revenge when really, the monster is haunting Frankenstein for his own revenge. Most of the book's themes include loneliness and rejection, and are explained well throughout the back stories of the characters. I feel that the book's only weak point is how the characters face their end. While the characters do indeed learn many life lessons, they never really accomplish anything. None of the characters have sentimental deaths, other than Frankenstein; the book just tells the reader that the character you have just grown attached to...well, dies. The book moves on from their deaths, and then the cycle repeats for the rest of the book. Overall, Frankenstein is a really good book, and I'd recommend it to people that like horror or mystery fiction.
Grade: 8
Ender's Game is an enthralling and thrilling sci-fi following a young boy as he is prepped to save the world. Ender departs for battle school at the ripe age of 6, where he is thrust into a world were children go head to head in a competition to be the best, fight in an all out war, and earn all the glory.
Although young and inexperienced, Ender is the best. But things seem to be stacked against him....
Orson Scott Card writes with incredible dexterity and Ender's Game pulls you into a new world.
(Reviewer Grade: 12)
Ever since her father died, Emika Chen has had trouble keeping her head above water. Her job as a bounty hunter barely pays the bills, and she's on the brink of getting evicted when she strikes proverbial gold. In Emika's world, an alternate near future, everyone is obsessed with the virtual reality game Warcross. During the Warcross International Championships opening ceremony, Emika hacks her way into the game, and gains instant international notoriety. She is recruited by Warcross creator, Hideo Tanaka, to use her bounty hunting skills to find another hacker who is threatening to destroy the Warcross championships.
This was a lot of fun. By far the best parts were Warcross descriptions. Imagine Quidditch meets the battle sims from Ender's Game in a completely virtual setting where the landscape changed in every game. The Warcross descriptions were epic, and quite frankly, I wish there had been more of them. Emika is likable enough, though she makes some really irritating decisions (I hate it when problems could be easily solved with communication and the lead just opts to keep everything to themself). I actually liked some of the side characters more than Emika - I would read a book starring pretty much anyone on her Warcross team. I hated Hideo with a passion though, I never could figure out why the world, and our lead, thought he was awesome (I mean, aside from the smart/rich/powerful thing, but those things do not a personality make). Any part featuring him had my eyes rolling back in my head. That being said, the cast is really diverse, which is refreshing, and for the most part, I liked 'em. There are also a few fun gaming references, and I'm sure I missed many more.
But, for all that it's a fun read, there were a few things hampering my enjoyment. The book had a few premise problems. Emika would utilize a solution/hack, and it's one where you're like - wouldn't this have easily solved your 5 earlier problems? People's motivations don't always make sense, but this could be fleshed out in the sequel. Oh, and there is a romance and it's awful and instalove adjacent.
Premise and romance issues aside, this read was a lot of fun. It's not a wholly original book, but the Warcross descriptions and twists at the end ensure that I'll be there for the next installment, which I suspect will be a
much better book. This was somewhere in between a 3-4 star read for me, so I'm rounding up because PPLD doesn't use half stars. 3.5 stars.
Much like short story anthologies by a single author (see Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors and Ray Bradbury’s The Golden Apples of the Sun ), Welcome to the Monkey House is both quintessentially a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s biting wit and satire as well as an exploration of other genres not often associated with Vonnegut’s style. Fans of Vonnegut will likely have already read some of these short stories (like “EPICAC” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”), but some of the other stories might have been missed and for a good reason.
Overall, Welcome to the Monkey House is a fantastic set of stories, but a few of them fail to have the impact to make them memorable. Granted, these stories are few and far between, and help to break up the well-written social commentaries presented in “Harrison Bergeron” and the titular “Welcome to the Monkey House.” Vonnegut’s ability to show the slippery slope of such ideas as “everyone is equal” and “sex is bad,” respectively, is just as poignant in short form as it is in his novels. The fusion of technology in these stories might seem dated by today’s standards, but they do reveal that Vonnegut was, inherently, a science-fiction writer.
What this collection does well is show that Vonnegut understood the importance of the characters in a story. One of the most entertaining in this collection was “Who Am I This Time?” which contained characters at such extremes of human expression as to be completely unrealistic but somehow relatable and entertaining. Stories like this, which don’t necessarily follow the political or societal commentary that the other stories provide, are nice breathers that give the reader a smile instead of drilling thought-provoking ideas into their skulls. It’s this balance that truly makes Welcome to the Monkey House a must-read.
Vonnegut, true to form as well as outside his element, I give Welcome to the Monkey House 4.0 stars out of 5.
As I read The Maze Runner , I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the story was meant for a video game instead of a novel. The Scorch Trials merely confirms my suspicions. I mean, who in their right mind would acronym their organization with WICKED? While the first book in this series had a pretty straightforward goal (escape the maze), the sequel made no sense whatsoever.
OK, these kids escaped the maze, but then what? The idea of traveling to the “safe haven” seemed to come so late in the plot that it almost felt like an afterthought.
Concerning the characters, the main ones are still there, but so many of the ancillary minor characters are so forgettable as to be practically useless.
Brenda was added into the mix merely to elicit a “love triangle” between the two love interests of the first book, but it just felt forced . . . like everything else in The Scorch Trials. Survival doesn’t make for a great motivation unless there’s something to hope for in the long run. I never got much of a sense of any of the characters’ motivations since around every turn the world they found themselves in was trying to kill them in ridiculous and unbelievable ways.
I think what turns me off about this series the most is that the “hand of the author” is obviously visible throughout. Nothing feels natural, and the exposition is spotty and done in huge chunks based off of a lull in the action instead of as a result of it. Each time the characters face a new challenge, there seems to be no weight behind it, since most of the “challenges” are basically to generate a conflict between the characters and the unseen organization while providing no new information as to what any of it means.
A book that should have been a video game, I give The Scorch Trials 2.0 stars out of 5.
In the near future, if Queen Victoria’s reign and the general principles of the time had been perpetuated, crown princess Victoria-Margaret is travelling to Toronto to masquerade as a commoner so that she can have a proper debut season. Regardless of who she meets, however, she will be required to marry a strong genetic match to ensure the strength of Queen Victoria I’s line. At the same time, non-socialite Helena and her beau August are heading to Toronto for Helena’s debut, and introduction into high society. The three will meet, and the events of the summer will change their lives forever.
I’m a huge sucker for books set in Victorian and Edwardian England, so I was eagerly anticipating this read. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. Part of the problem is that the charm of reading about Victorian England is that it is in the past. We certainly don’t accept a lot of those social sexist, racist and classist norms now (or at least, we pretend not to, but that’s a whole different discussion) and I think that’s for the best. It was weird to read a book about the future that’s not meant to be a dystopia where many of those awful norms are still acceptable. The author does acknowledge this in a note at the end, which is why I’m giving this two stars instead of one. There were also quite a few worldbuilding holes, if you will. For example, at one point, Margaret has a question about sexual identity. Bear in mind that this is a near future book in which the characters have access to computers and some form of the internet. So, instead of doing whatever the equivalent of googling the question would be, she e-mails her uncle, the archbishop, which no teen ever would actually do. Little inconsistent things like that popped up relatively often, and I found that it pulled me out of the story.
Speaking of the story, there’s not much in the way of plot here. That’s perfectly fine, if plot is being sacrificed for character development, but the characters here were not particularly compelling. The POV switches between the three main characters, and while all of the characters were nice and likable, they were also fairly bland. I didn’t care about anyone but Margaret until a big reveal about halfway through the story, at which point I started to find Helena interesting as well. I never could make myself care about August. All of that being said, I definitely think that romance readers will respond positively to this novel. I just kept getting bogged down in the worldbuilding or lack thereof, and never could connect with the characters. It wasn’t for me. Thanks to Dutton Books for Young Readers and Netgalley for the eARC. 2 stars.
The Ask and the Answer is the second book of Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking series. In this continuation, we see the original characters Todd and Viola venture farther from home as they try to outrun the lies of their previous lives. This book is a wonderful mix of brilliant, sad, courageous, and painful. As soon as I finished this book, all I wanted to do was pick up the next one. Ness's writing style is unique, and the characters are relatable and real. The events that transpire throughout The Ask and the Answer provoke a wide range of emotions, which makes it engaging. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has read the first Chaos Walking book, which is called The Knife of Never Letting Go.
Reviewer Grade: 11
Partly due to the success of The Hunger Games , the Young Adult genre swerved into the survival/sci-fi/dystopian genres that also allowed The Maze Runner to have a ready and willing audience. With this being the case, I’d almost say The Maze Runner has more utopian sensibilities since the narrative encourages teamwork for survival, instead of a “winner take all” emphasis presented in The Hunger Games that valued selfish ambitions over communistic altruism. Plus, if you put 50 teenage boys in a box with no adult supervision, I think the logical conclusion would be more along the lines of Lord of the Flies instead of solving a deadly maze.
While the premise was interesting and allowed for a constant and steady pacing of inciting events, I felt there was not enough explanation in this first part of the trilogy, with very few questions being answered by the end and a lot of hand-waving to push the characters forward to a conclusion. In fact, having seen the movie adaptation, I was hoping the book was better suited to explain the ending, but it was equally as confusing. That being said, there were key elements in the book (like the telepathy) that didn’t make it into the movie.
Overall, the few main characters in The Maze Runner were interesting and unique, even if it took some of them two years to even figure out the simplest parts of the maze. Still, fear can be a huge hindrance toward progress, so I guess I understand their predicament. Additionally, despite using a euphemistic system of swears as part of the characters’ unique jargon, I couldn’t help but think that this book would have been a lot more inappropriate for a young adult audience if the actual swear words were used instead.
An interesting premise with engaging characters, I give The Maze Runner 3.5 stars out of 5.
Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment" by James Patterson is about a group of kids (called the Flock for their avian abilities) who were experimented on, but escaped. When one of their own is kidnapped, they go on a mission to get her back. I found the concept of this book interesting, and the characters had a lot of potential, but I feel there was an element missing from the story. Max, the protagonist, didn't seem to develop throughout the book. Nor did her love interest Fang. There were parts of this story that didn't make sense plot-wise either. But, I don't regret reading it
-- it's a fun adventurous story with lots of humor. I'd still recommend it regardless.
Carve the Mark" is by Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent series.
I really liked the Divergent books, but I felt this book wasn't quite as gripping as her previous work. The plot was slow-moving, especially in the beginning. I also found the world confusing, it was difficult to keep track of it all. The characters, I felt, were also a little one-dimensional. It had potential, but I felt it didn't live up to it. I'd recommend reading the Divergent books instead. Grade: 11
The concept is simple: a machine takes your blood and spits out a card with the means of your demise printed on it. In this collection of short stories, a variety of authors explore what this truly means for individuals, as well as society as a whole. Based off an idea by Ryan North (author of “Dinosaur Comics”), this anthology has plenty of different approaches to the concept that a machine could predict how a person will die. However, many of these ideas hit upon the same concepts and social implications, making the whole thought exercise seem redundant by the end of the book.
Part of me felt the idea itself was a little derivative of Death Note, but with a more ambiguous set of constraints. Each of the short stories included in this anthology had some unique twist on the idea, ranging from humor to romance to horror. Still, every author tended to agree: a machine of death would bring about a dystopian future in some form or other. From governments requiring a “death reading” to mitigate any national disasters to a school needing to know how their prospective students will die so they can save face, the real enemies of this idea tended to be the bureaucracies of humanity.
While I honestly enjoyed the stories included in this anthology, they all seemed to suffer from the “a priori problem.” With each story titled with some way to die, you half-expect the story’s main character to end via that method. The intrigue is more in the how and when; thus providing interest to the story despite practically knowing the ending before it even starts. Granted, that’s part of the appeal of the machine: the ambiguity is as freeing as it is constraining.
A morbid set of interesting short stories, I give Machine of Death 4.0 stars out of 5.