Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m assuming that very few readers of this book will approach it without having already read the previous three books in the Old Man’s War series. So, I’m also making the same assumption about anyone reading this review.
I didn’t much enjoy the book. Plot and character are meant to be intertwined. The desires of the characters can and should drive the plot. The plot itself is usually a vehicle for character transformation and some kind of well-crafted payoff. A shift of perspective from mostly John and Jane to Zoe does a lot more than let you view the action from another angle. It divorces the plot from the players.
I didn’t care where the book, in general, was heading, not because I had already been over the same ground in the third book but because it didn’t fit Zoe’s own hero’s journey. I invested myself in some scenes but only in the way one might with a collection of short stories bound together by some kind of loose narrative thread. Her story is in there somewhere, but Scalzi would have had to left much of the borrowed plot go untold. I think he should have. He could have called it Zoe’s Tales.
I also had a lot of problems with Zoe’s voice and that of her teenage friend. They read to me as adults trying too hard to sound like teenagers, or at least, what teenagers sound like with their friends while their parents are around listening. Unsurprisingly, whenever the narrative dealt with things that didn’t bore Scalzi, like thrilling action or high stakes diplomacy, Zoe’s interactions and dialogue improved dramatically.
For the most part, I consider the book a failed experiment that had a lot of potential.
Levers and Pulleys 