nerd teacher [books] commented on Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty (The Midsolar Murders, #1)
Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …
Content warning In which I'm still annoyed by this book.
I keep trying to give this book the benefit of the doubt as I read it, trying to remind myself that authors don't pigeon-hole their own books...
... and then the author just does shit that just makes me want to throw it out of frustration. First—and this is a minor gripe—is that the author has a character say that she "went out with her girlfriend" to try on wedding dresses. For all of two seconds, I was hopeful that there would be a lesbian couple (at the minimum)... And no, it's the cishet lady speak that I have always found grating. Yes, I guess they are technically girl friends, but sigh. Disappointing use of a term that isn't really used that way as much.
The second is the timeline in this book. I don't know how it got through editing like this, without showing some clear indicator of changes in timeline. I know some authors write timelines that feel out of order, and that's fine... But again, if I'm reading a novel claiming to be a mystery? It feels a bit like a cheap way to hide clues, if there even are any. The entire 14th chapter is precisely this; it's a huge piece of exposition AND a flashback for a character that... hasn't even been named at any other point except on the list of injured in a space shuttle. It feels out of place, and it feels irrelevant to everything I've read... Kind of like someone slotted it into the book with no care in the world for why it was there.
Third is something I was reminded of which is another flashback scene depicting how Xan met the three Gneiss (the aliens named Stephanie, Ferdinand, and Tina) and their elder-Gneiss-but-a-ship-now grandpa Algernon. We've already met these characters (with limited descriptions of what they look like), so there's no reason for us to be sitting in Xan's perspective in the flashback not knowing who they are... Yet the author makes a decision to intentionally be confusing, even though she hasn't given you sufficient detail to really clue you in to who is who BEFORE that scene happens. It's so badly placed. This whole book is an organisational nightmare.