Overall, this is basically a heist story. Jazz works a porter/delivery girl by day, but makes her real living by smuggling prohibited goods into Artemis. This is a fast-paced novel that can easily be read in a day or two (and I am a fairly slow reader). Below is the list of my overall impressions after reading the novel:
- The heist plot was fairly engaging. It was also interesting to read about how things “worked” on the moon (the science-y aspects of the story).
- Weir’s female point of view was not convincing at all. Jazz sounded more like a teenage boy than a 26-year old woman. Quite a few of her remarks were cringe-worthy.
- One thing that annoyed me the most about the story was the familiarity between Jazz and the billionaire (Landvik?). I just thought their relationship was not very believable. How could two people, coming from and living in such vastly different circles, be so ridiculously familiar with each other (name-calling/friendly banter, etc)? Weir should have at least provided some background to justify this level of casualness.
- I also did not quite understand what went wrong in Jazz’s childhood to the point that she refused to get an education or a decent job. For someone who has so much potential/intelligence, she basically went from a rebellious teen to a loser in her late twenties with no real job or prospects in life. So she trashed her dad’s workshop at 16. What was she doing for the next 10 years? Weir did not present her back story in any sort of convincing way.
- Overall, the characters were not well-fleshed out. I appreciated Weir’s efforts in terms of making his characters diverse, but most of the time he did not move beyond caricatures or over-used stereotypes (a stern female Russian bodyguard, a crazy Ukrainian computer geek, Kenyans who are happy to break the rules and participate in/endorse smuggling operations).
- Bottom line: this was definitely not as good as the Martian. I rated this book at 4 out 5 stars purely for its entertainment value.
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