Mickey7

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I finished the book last night, I rounded 3.5 up to 4 stars, but now that the end-of-book-high has worn off, the problem I have with the characterization of Eight has become increasingly irritating to the point where I'm downgrading my rating. Now I'm at 2.5 rounding to 3. For the moment. Might go down to 2.

The premise of the book is centered around the concept that on a colonization mission to a new planet, one crew member is "Expendable," and after each death, he (Mickey) is bioprinted into a new body and comes out of the tank with the exact memories and personality of the original Mickey and all subsequent iterations as of the most recent upload data. So WHY does Eight come out of the tank acting like a jerk? For this premise to hold water, 7 and 8 should have been almost the same person, minus the most recent six weeks, and based on the personality of 7, nearly all the challenges of the story could have been either overcome or improved if 7 and 8 had simply talked to each other. Kept each other informed of what was going on, who said what to whom, etc. Heck, even keeping an open comm link might have helped! Then the story could have focused on the two of them working *together* to figure out what was up with the creepers rather than taking forever to figure out what the reader grasped immediately. I get that hunger makes people irrational and grumpy, but still. I find myself wanting to rewrite the story with the characterization problem solved to see how that could play out and what opportunities that might present with both Cat and Nasha.

For that matter, there were LOTS of characters who could have benefited from being 3-dimensional instead of archetypes. Berto, for one. Marshall, for another. Cat, Nasha, the prime creeper who never even gets a name.... Maybe later books in the series will flesh out the characters?

For readers' advisors: story doorway is primary, setting (outer space on an ice planet about a thousand years in the future) doorway is secondary. Some occasional swearing. Some death, but even the descriptions of the various ways Mickey has died are not especially graphic. References to sex, but it's of the fade-to-black variety.

View all my reviews

 

A Closed and Common Orbit

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this book SO much! I had a hard time getting into it because I started reading it quite soon after finishing book #1 in the series (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet), and book #2, although it begins right where #1 leaves off, only tangentially mentions the characters from the first book. I wasn't ready to say goodbye to the original characters at all, but once I got past that and started learning more about Jane 23, Pepper, Sidra, Blue, and eventually Tak, I became completely absorbed in their story.

For readers' advisors: character and setting doorways are primary. The world-building is incredible, and I spent much of the book wishing fervently that I could reach in and hug the characters. A fair amount of swearing, especially when Jane is a rebellious teenager. Some references to sex but no sex scenes. Not really any violence except for when Jane kills her first feral dog as it attacked. A Closed and Common Orbit has a non-linear structure, alternating between Jane's story in the past and Sidra's in the present. ("Present" being hundreds of years in the future somewhere else in the galaxy.) Many completely different species, and humans are far from dominant. There is really no such thing as a "white" person any more. One of the characters comes from a 4-gendered species, and xe is of the gender that regularly switches between male and female. (Can I just add how much I love the creation of neutral gender pronouns in this series?! Xe and xyr are SO much more useful and specific than using the plural "they" to refer to a singular person. I wish this would transfer to real life!)

View all my reviews