Reviews and Comments

4.5 stars for procedural/plotting, 2 stars for characters. Averages out to 4 stars because there's a lot more of the former.

Excellent procedural problem-solving writing and enthusiasm for science that bleeds through the page. The science facts and problems were fun.

I found the characters pretty flat. Noone other than Grace passes the Phantom Menace test, and Grace's emotional arc didn't work for me at all. The reveal toward the end wasn't justified by what happened before or after.

Looking forward to the movie, wondering how they'll make it work with Rocky's speech and the timeline.

I think "breezy" and "lightweight" often mean the same thing, but you use one or the other depending on whether you liked the book or not, so I'll say breezy.

I enjoyed the contrast of the characters and how they arrived at the same problem (unwilling to express self) from different angles (lack of confidence, trauma).

I thought the Natalie/Alex relationship was well written and liked how Natalie used therapy-speak to run Alex down.

This was generally well pitched to a YA audience. Suggestive instead of sexual, profanity was used sparingly and was effective when it was used.

The book was entirely uninterested in men, which is totally fine.

I think a month was too fast for the amount of events that occurred, but I'm not 18 anymore.

Found out afterward that the book was semi-autobiographical and written by two wives, would be very interested to find out what their writing process was.

Listened to the audiobook in one day on a long car trip. I thought the audiobook was generally good, except a little too much performance.

Continuing my practice of reading a poem every day. Picked this because I like "Danny Deever" from Starship Troopers and "Boots", which I first saw in the 28 Years Later trailer.

Going to be an exercise is separating the art from the political context.

A lot of these aren't great in isolation, but taken as a whole they give a great glimpse of Marina's mind and have a complete, satisfying arc.

Individual favorites are:

Starlight Water Space Fresh Air Fizz Four Seasons Tiny Leopards

I found these generally took more effort that reading a regular novel because each time you have to adjust to the world of the story, you can't just dip in and out.

The stories I liked the most were the "Black Mirror" style ones where there was a strange technology or a twist. The "queer person turns into a monster" stories kind of ran together for me.

I also liked the stories for non-Western cultures that explored their own monsters.

Of the poems, Floral Arrangement I was the one I liked the best.

The world building here doesn't fundamentally make sense, there's no universe in which building 200,000 mile rails to colonize Jupiter is more feasible in terms of knowhow or resources that fixing Earth or even colonizing the Moon or Mars. However, you owe it to the author to suspend disbelief on the central premise and go for the ride. The worldbuilding about all the heat and light coming from gas flames was so good it felt like it was the initial idea that the setting formed around.

The strengths were the worldbuilding and the formal language that made everything feel retro-futuristic.

The primary weakness, in my view, was that a good mystery often involves a unique or creative "perfect crime". In order to write a perfect crime, you have to work within the rules of the real world. If your perfect crime involves a creative interpretation of a fictional world, the rules you yourself made, it feels less clever. As an example, there's a reveal that a suspect had a creative way of riding the train. This didn't really feel like anything to me because the author hadn't previously established how people normally ride space trains.

There wasn't a lot to the love story, but I am guessing it will build in later installments.

I liked it and thought it was very funny that "conservative" is a swear.

Theo was a worse person than Kit but a better narrator and Theo's section were more fun to read. Kit's sections were more of a chore and I didn't much like how he described things.

Theo was a good example of a nonbinary character and someone who was emotionally closed off.

The characters could be frustrating when they made up reasons not to be together. I get that that's kind of the point, but it rankled over the course of the whole book.

Wish fulfillment book that was honest about what it was. Author was clearly putting themselves in the role of Theo.

I'm not a foodie so the food descriptions didn't do it for me. Not the author's fault, but I sometimes felt like I was missing out.