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11/12 booksRead 12 books by Dec 31, 2024. You're 2 books ahead of schedule. 🙌
Note: There are some plot spoilers revealed in this review, so please read with caution if you don't want things spoiled!
I'm going to preface this review by being completely honest. When I see a book that has “James Patterson” co-writing with another author on it, I already get an expectation of what's written inside, and it may not exactly be the most flattering thing. I don't read them if I want a deeply rich and engrossing read. I don't read it if I want a compelling story or richly-written characters. None of that kind of stuff. Patterson to me has always been quick reads with entertainment as the priority.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting nothing more than an exciting and/or entertaining story. Sometimes, that's all you need for a book to be good. I respect that and understand that. But, I will say, that as a result, these Patterson collaboration books can come off as rather shallow to me. I don't know how much of it can contributed to Michael Ledwidge and how much is attributed to Patterson. I don't really read Ledwidge, so I can't personally anything on his behalf. I've heard from rumors that books like these, Patterson only writes a small chunk or more or less “produces” the book. Who knows? I don't, so I won't really be focusing on who might've done what. That being said, I went into this with sort of low but understanding expectations, and Zoo doesn't really do anything to change that for me. Without spoilers and without rambling on, Zoo has an interesting premise that's filled with areas of mediocrity in execution in character, plot, and prose, but is entertaining enough if you don't ask for much out of this book.
Open discussion of plot past this point, including spoilers.
The premise is intriguing enough, and one that sounds like it could really lend itself to be a cool science thriller of some kind. Animals are seemingly attacking human around the world on a widespread scale, almost in a coordinated way. The main character, nicknamed Oz, is trying to prove that this phenomena exists to the skeptics who refuse to believe and find its cause as everything descends into chaos and humans are subject to an onslaught of attacks from the animal population.
So, first things first: About the writing, I know Patterson books has a sort of style of writing where they focus on shorter chapters and sentences. It quickens up the pace and keeps things moving, which I appreciate. I can't Zoo being twice its length and having denser writing, I probably wouldn't have the resolve to finish it. And it really helps with a book like this in its job, which is to be an engaging page thriller. I will admit though, it does have the effect of making the writing feel choppy. Chapters will end quickly, scenes will come and go. It doesn't help that there's a five year time skip in the middle of the story which comes out of absolute nowhere. It's the most jarring effect. Its placement doesn't make any sense to me. Oz finds out his girlfriend has been killed by his pet chimpanzee (a bit more on that later), and he just makes some little quip about it to his new and very obviously written love interest (also more on that later) and then...time skip? No reaction to anything else? No retrospect on the firsthand data he's collected? No little narrative transition of “And Oz realized the journey had only just begun.”? It's like there was a chunk of the story that was lost in the fire, and the authors really didn't want to try to rewrite it or make smooth transitions, so they just put a time skip in there and called it good. I'm not saying that they had to write 100 extra pages of story to link together the two parts of the book (though I think it maybe would've been better, more on that later as well), but...I don't know. It's a move that utterly confuses me as a reader.
Second, something that personally stood out to me as being weak: the characters and how they're written. Oz himself doesn't really stand out to me in any way, or at least in a way that I think is good. I guess I do appreciate that he's more of an outcast in the scientific community instead of established and respected scientists, it's different and a source of interesting conflict. Or actually, it should be a source of interesting conflict, but it's only that way for about 30% of the story and then it's disregarded after the time skip (when he's now the head authority and being consulted by the President of the United States). It's like he was trying to be written as an antithesis to a stereotypical scientist protagonist, which I respect, but it comes off as Oz trying to be too cool. Cracking one-liners, being witty, listening to AC/DC and Metallica, giving thongs to his girlfriend and making hot jungle love with her. It comes off as trying too hard, but I understand that might be more a personal thing than anything else.
Any other characters besides Oz are thoroughly uninteresting and don't stick out in any other way. I can say right now that it's an absolute struggle to remember any of their names. I can remember Claire's, but only because she's the only other character in this story who gets any sort of meaningful focus, even if it doesn't fall out of the range of “obvious love interest later turned obvious family baggage for main character.” I get that the book is written from Oz's perspective, but when I can tell exactly what kind of shallow role a character is going to play just from Oz's shallow and blunt narration, it makes it harder to remember or care about them. I can say right now that Natalie's death registered very little reaction from me, something I share in common with Oz (yeah, Oz. Just a witty quote and then barely think about her afterwards. But I guess that's good, now that your Modern Ware 2 playing, high-libido, beer-drinking, one-of-the-guys neuroscience-studying girlfriend is dead, it lets you quickly move onto your second girlfriend). I guess I remember the chimpanzee. Maybe for not the right reasons. But hey, I understand that in this kind of book, it's not meant to slow down and give any kind of focus on any of the characters. Still, it would've been nice to see other written characters that weren't just walking cardboard cutouts for the story or obvious tropes that are only meant to be baggage.
Now, the last thing, and the thing where it all falls apart for me. The execution of the plot and characters, or I suppose the writing itself. Okay, I get it. This is no Jurassic Park. This is no Relic. This isn't supposed to be some deeply researched, deeply thought-provoking, multi-layered story. And I like I said before, that's 100% okay and there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, I like for things to still be cohesive and logical, for things to still make sense to the reader. Things that characters do and say can be utterly confusing from a reader's perspective with little to no explanation, and you just have to connect the dots yourself. And I think this is greatly illustrated in Attila, the book's chimpanzee character. So, we know Oz. He's a fringe scientist who's desperately researching the phenomena of animals attacking humans, trying his best to convince people of the danger they're finding themselves facing. He's obviously very committed to this, spending all of his money traveling to different countries to research it, risking his romantic relationship, dropping out of school to pursue it...
...so why the hell would a guy like this have a pet chimpanzee in his apartment???
Why? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. And there's no explanation for it at all. There's never a “this chimpanzee will save the humans from animals,” “this chimpanzee is different from the animals,” or even “i'm keeping it as an experiment to study animal attacks, let me sic him on the entire apartment complex.” I don't need to go into details of how chimpanzees are extremely dangerous without an apocalyptic animal attack scenario going on, especially a male chimpanzee cooped up in an apartment complex in an unfamiliar setting. And Oz is shocked and surprised when this chimpanzee goes ballistic and kills and eats his girlfriend? How is the reader supposed to take any of that seriously? I do recall that Oz briefly thinks something to the effect of “Oh damn, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. I messed up on that call.” Uh, yeah. You think, buddy? You need to use all two of your brain cells to figure that out? For being the only scientist in the world who can figure out the animal attack phenomena, he sure doesn't seem all that intelligent. I get this is a book that is meant to stretch your suspension of disbelief, and I accept that, but things should still make at least a tiny bit of sense.
There's more examples, but this review is getting way too long and I think I need to stop. All in all, Zoo's nothing more than one of those shallow thrillers that get you through a long airplane ride. And if that's all you're looking for, great. That's all this books really is. But think about anything past a shallow level, and it falls apart and becomes that much more flawed.
If Oz is the kind of hero who will save our world, maybe our world deserves to be doomed.
(Interesting little side note, I just want to say that my friend who is majoring in biology looked at the explanations for why the animals are becoming more aggressive, and laughed at it a bit. I don't understand biology at all, so the scientific explanations were okay to me, but she saw the explanations given about hydrocarbons and animal pheromones and thought it was funny. I'm not holding it against the book at all, since it's obviously just a fictional book and not meant to be taken super seriously or be super realistic. Just thought I'd point it out as a little P.S. to my review.)
Hovering around 3.75-4 stars.
This was a book where my star rating went up the more as I read the book. It started as a pretty “meh” 3 out of 5, but the score had risen by the time I reached the end.
It had an intriguing premise: a mysterious, giant hand is uncovered by a young girl in her backyard. As the years go on, the journey to find the other parts of whatever enormous robotic body it belonged to unfolds, along with the mission to find out what exactly it is and what it does. But it wasn't just the premise that caught my interest: the format did as well. Instead of traditional narrative prose, the book is told in epistolary format. It uses the form of documents and transcripts, but mostly interviews between characters to tell the story. For me, the epistolary format is a bit of a mixed bag. It can be a very intriguing way to tell a story and give it a certain kind of tone/atmosphere...but it's a common shortcoming that due to their nature, epistolary novels often suffer from a very bad case of “telling, not showing.” I've read books in this format that were just exposition dump after exposition dump, and it gets to be a drag to read.
This one was a pretty engaging read. I was pretty invested in the plot. I wanted to read on as the characters worked to untangle the mystery of the giant robotic hand and see what would happen. Also, with the interview format, I found the characters decently captivating, and the author did a good job giving the main characters their voices and showcasing their personality through their words only, which I consider pretty hard to do since you can't use described action to show what these characters are like. Certain developments in the plot got me hooked enough to want to keep going and events happening to characters took me for a surprise.
I have some complaints with the book: it does sort of fall into the exposition dump from time to time, but it is by no means bad, in my viewpoint. It also suffers from a common epistolary problem in that sometimes, characters say things in supposed “interviews” that don't sound natural, since you're supposed to believe that the characters are saying this out loud in a conversation (I cannot imagine anyone saying with any kind of natural tone a sentence like “he had leathery-esque skin” out loud to someone else). A big plot complaint is, without any spoilers, how we get the “explanation” for the giant robot body parts. It seemed to come absolutely out of nowhere with no build-up, no foreshadowing, just dump a random exposition character in there.
On that last note...to be fair, this is the first in a trilogy of books, and it may be meant to be explored in the later books. The book ends on a cliffhanger, and a pretty intriguing one...
All in all, a pretty good book that's held back by some flaws, but an enjoyable read with a unique format!
4.5/5 rating, rounded down.
I've had this on my TBR list for a long time, but it unfortunately kept getting buried by other books. I finally took some time to read it.
What a ride!
Enjoying this book is the same way you might enjoy something like a rigorous hike. This isn't an easy, fun read. This isn't a story of some wacky aliens and a human who tries to be friends with them. Dawn by Octavia E. Butler is a deep, intriguing, and unsettling read. The story discusses the nature of consent, reproductive agency, gender roles, community and identity, human nature, eugenics, and the ethics of assimilation. But Butler doesn't answer any questions about any of these subjects in her book. She explores them.
The premise is as follows: Lillith Ayapo is a human woman who lived on Earth right up until its destruction by nuclear war. But she did not die. Instead, she was saved alongside a handful of humanity by aliens known as the Oankali. The Oankali are a spacefaring race with three sexes: male, female, and ooloi. All three are needed for reproduction, and their social structure is shaped by the presence of these three sexes. The question quickly emerges: why did the Oankali rescue the humans? Out of the kindness of their hearts? As it turns out, the Oankali do want something from the humans: they want to breed with the humans and exchange genetic information.
There's so much to unwrap to this story. It would take so much time to discuss and go through every subject that I mentioned before! So, to keep it concise and spoiler-free, I will say that one of my absolute favorite things about this book is the depth in which Butler crafts each ethical issue. Obviously, most of us look at our current human history and say the following basic statements without much hesitation: colonization is bad, eugenics is bad, and consent is good. In Dawn, the same scenarios are presented but in a much more ambiguous way. Butler doesn't portray any parties in the book as the “good guys” or the “bad guys.” There are many layers to every issue presented in the book, nothing is presented as shallow. There's no spoon-feeding of one-dimensional issues and villains.
Lillith too, is the same way. I've seen so many debates on her actions, how ethical they are, what would be the right thing to do in her shoes. But the way I see it...is there a right answer to this whole scenario? There's a very poignant issue of power balance between the humans and Oankali, one that Lillith finds herself right in the middle of. How much agency does she truly have in the role she's picked to play?
The questions of assimilation and consent in this novel are built so they do not have easy answers and everyone will take away their individual thoughts. The book is, essentially, your springboard. One of my favorite things is going online and seeing people have such widespread opinions on the morality of the Oankali and the situation the humans find themselves in.
The world and situation itself are interesting to read. It's a unique exploration of two common subjects in speculative fiction–the destruction of Earth and first contact. The way Butler describes the visceral reaction of Lillith to the Oankali is vivid. The aliens themselves have a touch of body horror to them in how, well, alien they are to us. The way they talk, the way they approach interaction with humans...it's a fascinating deep-dive without becoming a boring information dump. The stark, alien world that Butler creates for us makes the experience for the humans even more impressionable to me. I was feeling the same sense of awe and fear that the main characters felt.
There are scenes that were uncomfortable to read, that gave me uneasy knots in my stomach. But they only added to the experience of this story. It is a horrifying situation that the humans find themselves in, and things transpire that are shocking to read. Some of my all-time favorite fantasy and science fiction stories are the ones we can use as a reflection of our state of being.
The ending was quite abrupt to me, but honestly, I feel like that's my main complaint with 99% of the books I read. But I get it, the story moves forward. There's more to read about and see how things progress.
All in all, a very fascinating book. Honestly, the reason why I'm rounding down the rating instead of rounding it up to a 5 is that this is not a book that I will probably go back and re-read frequently. But you know what? This is definitely a novel that will stick with me.
(4.5 out of 5 stars)
My time with this book started out interesting. I was first introduced to this book in a speculative fiction class I took in college, where we had to read it quickly, so I carved out large chunks of time to power through this book in a few days. My initial thoughts on the book were not super great, overall a “meh” experience. The setting was very interesting, but I didn't find any of the characters or conflicts compelling when I first read it. To me, it seemed more like Stephenson had simply made a glittery playground for his named creations to play around with.
It wasn't until later in the year, when we began re-reading sections and discussing it more thoroughly that I started to form an interest in it. After the class, instead of returning it, I kept it so I could re-read it again. It's amazing how different of an opinion you can have after re-reading a book. It makes me wonder what happened before that made my brain click different this time.
The world-building is definitely unique and makes for a very compelling setting. It takes place in a future where nanotechnology has become integrated into all aspects of life. Limitless resources are now available to the general public. You would think that this would cause the Earth to become a utopia, with everyone finally having free access to everything that they could ever need. The truth, in reality, is that there is still poverty and also rampant pollution. Society has stratified itself into “claves” based on different things (communism, religion, etc.), and those without claves are known as “thetes” are the most vulnerable of citizens.
It's not only in the technology that the world has changed. Different cultures and territories have since been created too. Neo-Victorian culture has since become popular and widespread, and China has multiple new territories, some of them still parts of China and others becoming more independent from the mainland culture.
The world-building is very fulfilled, and exotic while still being grounded, and easy to make comparisons to our current society and how it might progress to this point. The conflict of this story is compelling and rich; Stephenson dives into many questions that he explores through this new near-future Earth. It's not just about technology, but also the question of a stratified society, classism, and western values vs. eastern values. All of these conflicts make the world-building even richer. Citizens in the world do not deal with just one issue that eclipses the entire story (“the big bad empire is coming to conquer us”, “war is bad and we should feel bad”).
The characters are equally diverse and intriguing. There are many of them that get focused on in this novel. Usually, I'm wary of books that jump around to multiple viewpoints. I find myself either really liking it or really hating it. I'm happy to say this book falls in the former category. Most of the characters are legitimately interesting to read about, and they're all used to further the world-building and major conflicts that are explored in this story. Watching step-by-step the process that Nell develops through being taught by the Primer while simultaneously seeing Hackworth come to terms with the consequences of his actions when he illegally copied the Primer for his own daughter was exciting to read. Even the beginning chapter with Bud, a character who is only in a single chapter, set the tone for the story and still managed to be an intriguing character to read about.
Now, onto the cons...
This one, I will admit, is more subjective. I am very much the kind of person who is very hard to please with loose ends. Yes, I've heard all of the arguments supporting them. Real life is full of loose ends. You don't always get answers. You're not owed answers. I agree...but it doesn't make it any easier for me to accept. I at least like to have enough to where I feel like I can be wondering in a satisfied manner. Miranda's storyline, without any spoilers, ends so abruptly to me that I wonder what the point of the ending is when the beginning is so fascinating.
And the ending, as is the case in many books, leaves a lot to be desired for me. Every time I come up to it, I leave with the same disappointing feeling of “That's it. The book's ended, and there's nothing more.” Endings are probably the hardest thing to do in anything, whether it be in books or essays, or movies, so I try not to be too hard on them. I'm not the kind of person who believes that an ending should ruin an entire experience. After all, it's about the journey, not the destination. I think it's because I like this book so much that I wish there was a more satisfying end to me.
All in all, I really enjoy this book and it's one of my favorites. It's honestly made me more interested in Stephenson's other book and ignited a greater desire to read more science fiction books like this. Less “space travel” and more “what's happening on Earth 100 years in the future.” I've got a few more Stephenson books on my reading list now!
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