Zoe's Tale

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 to the characters and the universe at large.

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 I imagine I would've been more frustrated tackling these back-to-back.

In a vacuum, it's a fine piece of sci-fi with literal aliens and scheming and diplomacy, but it did read like YA because our protagonist this round was a literal teenage girl. And to his credit, the author does mention in the acknowledgements that this was a difficult book to write, specifically because he felt that he had already written it (and I as a reader felt like I had already read it). Taken as part of the larger whole however, I'd probably tell people not to feel bad if they skipped this one.

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 which.. well that's like eating fiber pills.

It was written well though. Scalzi is a wordsmith and this book read a bit more relaxed than his other triology. It was loose, it was wittier, it was about a teenage girl. Well, duh, it should.

I liked the character development, the relationships, and caveats, it all rang well in timber and resonance.

So--if you want to read this and you just finished Last Colony, unless you are just dying to re-read the story I'd let this one sit on your shelf until you got a little foggy on the remembrance then it would be a fun read down memory lane with a different vantage and path.

I do wonder if this book could be added into Last Colony, the first 2/3rds could fit near like a glove.

Anyhow! Onwards!

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. I am disappointed.

When I read the - great! - ending of the previous book, and heard that John and Jane were going to live happy lives where they were and that their story was over, and Zoe would now take over, I expected something completely different. At first I thought it was going for a quick recap and then get on with the actual story. I waited and waited and nope ... it's not a quick recap it's the same story all over. I had not read any reviews about this. There was no warning that I noticed anywhere. The end of the previous book suggested that from now on the reader would read Zoe's adventures, nothing suggested that it would be the same adventure from a different point of view.

It's as if Scalzi originally planned to have Zoe's viewpoint in the previous book but had to cut it out, and a year later he decided to blow it up to a complete book mirroring the original. Yes it clears up a few of the "mysterious" things Zoe has been doing. And it introduces more detail to her friends Gretchen and Enzo and I suspect the special mission John sends her on to the alien general will be described later on, and maybe, just maybe there'll be some new stuff at the end (one review claimed the final 100 pages are the justification for all the rest) but right now I am not sure I am willing to stick around. Last night I fell asleep with the book in my hand. It was literally boring me to sleep.

Review of the rest: 4 stars - so the review that said the last 100 or so pages make it worth was right. I totally agree. But I can't help thinking that if I had known about this experiment before I started reading, my enjoyment of the story would have been better. If only there had been a clear explanation at the beginning that I didn't have to expect something completely new. So when I put the book down at 30%, I had no intent of ever reading the rest, because I was so bored with reading the same story again.

But then there was a day where I needed something easy ... and I read the rest of the book in the space of two days. Yes it's still the same story and I am still disappointed about that but just around where I quit the first time the story starts filling up the blanks from the previous book instead of only having the same scenes we had before. The book became much better which averages out to the 3 stars I gave it now.

The story about Zoe and Enzo becomes a real tear-jerker and so does the mission to General Gau, which really turns out quite interesting. All of this creates a believable journey of growth for her and I am hoping the next book will have more of her.

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 action, and it was so spot on. So frustrating.