Zoe's Tale

, #4

320 pages

English language

Published March 27, 2008

ISBN:
978-0-7653-1698-1
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4 stars (106 reviews)

How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history?

I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.

Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don't know my tale: How I did what I did ― how I did what I had to do ― not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. I'm going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try to make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic …

5 editions

reviewed Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, #4)

I liked it, but not the strongest in the series

3 stars

There's a lot to like here, but story-wise it does retread a lot of ground we've honestly seen before. I think in the notes he mentioned he wanted to sew up a few plotholes once he started writing it, but honestly, the last 25% of the book probably could have been a short by itself. Zoe is an interesting, fun character to follow, though. Mostly what makes this book weaker is that it's retreading the same water we just swam out of.

reviewed Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

An interesting experiment in perspective

4 stars

This is an interesting experiment: Scalzi tells the story of The Last Colony again, this time from Zoe's perspective. It reads a bit like the second half of a Director's Cut: scenes and thoughts that explain some parts of the first book, but ultimately didn't make the final edit.

Scalzi doesn't stop there, though: as he explains in the acknowledgments, he needed the book to stand on its own feet, so he also tells a story that is separate from the proceedings of the last book, and since it's about a teenager, he wraps it in a coming-of-age tale about finding yourself and standing up for what you've found.

This book may not have as satisfying a plot as the last one, but it seems very personal and can be quite touching. In the way it builds on The Last Colony it manages to add both to that book and …

reviewed Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, #4)

-

3 stars

I'm not big on re-reading books because my TBR pile is big enough as it is, but I feel like I just got tricked into doing so with this one. This fourth book in this series... just re-tells the same story from the third book, almost scene-for-scene, just from a different character's perspective. Maybe it's just because I don't tend to read book series in general, but this feels like a strange approach to me?

Granted, there was a suspiciously convenient deus ex machina moment towards the end of the previous book, and now we finally get an explanation on exactly what happened because we follow the character responsible for it. Kinda wish we didn't need to re-hash all the previous events from the same starting point to learn all that though. Maybe it's for the best that it's been several real-world months since I've read the previous book because …

reviewed Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, #4)

Review of "Zoe's Tale" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

As someone who deeply loves Back to the Future: Part II, I’m thrilled with this idea of diving back into the previous story from a fresh perspective. As someone who notices that all of Scalzi’s characters talk like snarky teens, I’m pleased to see him finally take one on as protagonist. His emotional depth—not usually a sci-fi strong suit—remains impressive, and this new perspective on the universe he’s built offers some potent examinations of privilege and morality.

reviewed Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, #4)

Review of "Zoe's Tale" on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I enjoyed this book. The protagonist was another kind of interesting character besides The World. We didn't learn much new about the World, but the few things we did were kind of enjoyable. Some parts seemed to stretch my suspension of disbelief skills a bit, some where a bit full of pathos, but in general, all around pleasant read (well, listen).

reviewed Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, #4)

Review of "Zoe's Tale" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Oh this book has me all mixed up. I read it because in the linear to-read-within-the-family lists, this book was placed after Last Colony. I didn't realize it was basically the retelling of that tale but through Zoe's eyes.

First. It was good. It was very good YA style book. It filled in a lot of missing details and after we branched away from the colony it read even better.

The however.... However, I would not have read this book right after Last Colony if I had known this. I'd have waited a few months. Reading it so close made it hard to read. You knew what was going on. I just left this story, re-reading it was..weird and challenging. Knowing what was to happen and remembering the other book so vividly made me not want to read it as much. That meant I had to just power through it …

reviewed Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, #4)

Review of "Zoe's Tale" on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

TL;DR: Massively boring beginning. This is a rather experimental story with a great, tear-jerky ending in which Zoe grows up quite a bit.

Warning: This book has the exact same plot as [b: The Last Colony|88071|The Last Colony (Old Man's War #3)|John Scalzi|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1437660786s/88071.jpg|18279847] from beginning to end, only this time Zoe is telling the story. My review is in two parts because I quit reading at 30% with no intent of finishing the book, and then read it anyway a week later (not because it was so great, quite the opposite but because I was out of other books).

Review of first third of the book: 2 stars - Because as far as I can tell at this point, there's nothing new. Yes it's still Scalzi's enjoyable writing style, and I do like Zoe's snark and sarcasm quite a bit. But I feel ripped off, time- and money-wise. …

Review of "Zoe's Tale" on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

While it was nice to fill in a couple of blanks from The Last Colony, this book really frustrated me. It suffered from the same arch-nerd tone that The Last Colony did, but I also found the voice of the teenage protagonist to be just totally not credible. I feel bad writing that, since Scalzi even addressed it in the afterword to the book and seems to have really tried to get it, but it just did not work for me. I just don't see a teenager lecturing the head of a 400-race galactic Conclave like she's the smartest kid in math class. The tone was just all wrong. To be fair, I read the whole thing, but I swear I don't know why.

Also, I read a criticism of Scalzi about his tendency to have his characters talk about some action that happened, rather than just giving us the …

reviewed Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Old Man's War, #4)

Review of "Zoe's Tale" on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I liked how this book fleshed out Zoe's perspective. However, I ended up skimming large parts of the book as it just wasn't interesting. The parts that we didn't know anything about, like meeting the creatures in the woods and the Obin - those were fascinating.

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