The city shined in the sunlight like a bunch of metallic boobs. What? I’m not a poet. They look like boobs.

This is not a bad story. Of course I read [b: The Martian|18007564|The Martian|Andy Weir|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1413706054s/18007564.jpg|21825181] and I loved that and somehow maybe that skewed my expectations.

What this book has: a good setting - Artemis is an interesting place, especially the origins story of how it came to be; Jazz as protagonist wasn't bad but I didn't warm to her or her weird kind of "humor" - or is it self-deprecation? The plot was not bad. The half-way twist was indeed pretty good.

However.

“On a scale from one to ‘invade Russia in winter,’ how stupid is this plan?”

The problem wasn't the plan itself but the details of the description. I felt like 90% of the book was some kind of technical description or other. The actual action was so little and the interaction even less. So much more could have been made of Rudi and Jazz' interaction for example.

This same stuff worked better in The Martian where the whole story revolves about survival, about man vs universe. On the moon, with its settled city, even when Jazz is doing EVAs, it doesn't seem to matter so much and it just didn't work for me. The stakes are different here and the writing should have been, too. This is a crime, maybe a mystery, or a thriller...

I wish this had been a short story. Or a novella. Because that's what it is filled up with tedious description of details that are admirably researched but essentially ... boring. And that's what the book ended up doing despite the potential of the set-up: it bored me.

PS: and I really didn't like how Jazz managed to win fights against a professional assassin on her hunches. That just immediately re-instates my disbelief