Joe Rocklin

This was good, but I debated between 3 and 4 stars. I went into the book thinking it was young adult fiction. It is not. But it was a good story that kept me hooked. I listened to an audiobook version and appreciated the presentation of the different narrators with different actors. In general, I would recommend this but probably only to adults.

I gave the series a try, but I'm giving up a couple of chapters into book four. The plot holes are massive, and each book follows the same pattern: gore, miraculous survival of the protagonists, everyone else dies. Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe I'm seeing them through a lens of having just finished a long time with Terry Pratchett novels, but the story here couldn't hold me any longer.

This was a wonderful book to read. I was aware of Von Braun before reading this, and after a trip to Huntsville, decided that I wanted to know more. This book did not disappoint! Bob Ward's extensive notes and references show that this is a very well researched effort.

I remove one star due to some chapters in the book which break the timeline and to add details of the personal life of Von Braun and the coworkers. I found this information interesting, but it skipped forward and backward in time to keep it contained in a single chapter. I would rather have seen these stories interspersed with that of the main story ark.

I thought the final installment in the Rama series was an improvement over the previous. If you can make it through “The Garden of Rama” then you will be treated with more science fiction as we meet alien species. It veers into an interesting social commentary when comparing the actions and behaviors of those species when compared to humans. Overall, it is a worthwhile end to the timeline - not altogether unpredictable, but a good story nonetheless.

This was good, twisty, timey-wimey adventure. There was some hard science fiction regarding causality, and while the technical details start to sound a bit like techno-babble at times, it doesn’t take away from the story. There are ethical dilemmas to work through as there are with any time travel story. Threading through this story is a mystery that sees us following a cast of characters through events in all of their histories. Everyone has a secret, and we find out about all of them by the end of the book.

The beginning of the book felt a bit rushed and choppy. I knew nothing about the author when starting, and thought that maybe this is just his style. It wasn’t a bad read, but it was missing some details that I wanted. I stuck with it because the story was interesting enough. And I’m glad I did because, the half-way point, I got sucked in deeper and had a hard time putting it down!

Also, there are dinosaurs.