reviewwritingfordummies

LOVE

Revisado: 06-05-20

This is such a cute story and I love the way the narrator read it. I come back and listen to it every once in a while because it's short and silly. I recommend it to people as well and forced my SO to listen to it. The sad parts make me cry every time. I'm so glad I downloaded this.

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Not a Book for Anyone Interested in Science

Revisado: 05-28-20

This book was really a struggle for me to get through. It was recommended to me and I'm now wondering why this person thought I would like it.

A lot of the explainations were really drawn out and I'm wondering where everyone is getting the "well researched" thing from. The book reads like he read a few Wikipedia articles and paraphrased them into drivel about what a character did or is doing. I'm still completely shocked at how long he explained heliocentric vs geocentric orbit as if it's not something you wouldn't learn about in 5th grade. While a lot of the space physics are correct or at least possible, a large portion of the biology and genetics is completely wrong or taken with a shallow understanding. For example, there was an analogy about turning a wolf into a dog with selective breeding and so a future race of people could be selectively bred into living under water. The uniqueness of a canine's DNA makes that possible, a wild cat and a house cat still look and act relatively the same as well as a jungle fowl and a chicken. Also, Neanderthals were not giant people, they were actually shorter than homosapiens, just stockier.

Seems like the author has little grasp on sociology and anthropology as well. A lot of the future races and culture just doesn't really make sense. Why would the future races not interbreed? Especially when it's explicitly stated several times that two of the races have a bond that makes them more attracted to each other. Also, 5000 years in human history is such a long time. They talk about the Eves like they're only a few generations removed, but 5000 years ago Egyptians were still learning how to embalm a body.

To be honest, the majority of the last third of the book was really racist. He describes humans and their races as if they were dogs. I'm not super surprised by this based on a couple things earlier in the book, namely the opinion that Japanese people were more disciplined and Italians were not and that was due to genetics and not literally their culture, or the "that thing that all people of Spanish decent have in common in their faces". I did laugh out loud when he said racism didn't exist anymore in that culture when literally the whole thing was so racist. I would take this as social commentary by the author if he didn't already indicate that he knows little about sociology, anthropology, and biology.

And the idea that all these people are genetically different is, again, shallow understanding of genetics and DNA. There's just really no way for this to have happened considering the fact that a race of humans living on an asteroid where the moon used to be would naturally evolve to adapt to lower gravity and minimal atmosphere, etc. Then, there's the fact that DNA displays differently depending on many factors, so even if these women wanted to make a race that was super smart or whatever, there's no guarantee it would even occur. Plus, again, why would they not interbreed?

The first two thirds of the book was okay and I thought the ending of it made up for how God awful the first third of the book was, but the last third of the book went right back to being bad, but in a different way. The last third of the book just shouldn't even have happened. If he really wanted to add it, make another book, maybe?

Now, for the narrator, the female narrator was just so terrible. The accents were really bad and inconsistent. If you thought of a characature of an ethnicity and a mocking way of what they sounded like, that was this woman's accents. The male voices she made were just the absolute worst. Like, almost of the voices sounded cartoony, but the male voices are just so bad it's laugh out loud funny. I would say this book is almost worth listening to if you want to laugh at how bad someone can do voices. It really makes me wonder why they would hire a male narrator for the last third of the book and not have him do the male voices for the first two thirds.

If you are someone who isn't very science savvy, but might enjoy learning a bit about it and also aren't super into fantasy or scifi either, this might be a good read for you though.

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The Best Novel I've Ever Read/Listened To

Revisado: 05-15-20

It's a little bit confusing at first, but after you get a couple chapters in, you start to understand everything. The reveals toward the end of the book have blown my mind and I honestly never expected them. Even the author point of view of the story for some characters. The apocalyptic future world, the invention of new words, the new cultures, so much of it is so cleaver. I sort of expected the social commentary, but it was put in an interesting way that wasn't too overt. i read a lot of fantasy and this book was put together very thoughtfully.

I loved the narrator of this as well. Narrators often do voices for different characters, but her's were subtle enough the characters didn't sound really dumb, but different enough that you could tell which character was which and whether characters were male or female. The accents weren't super comical either like I've heard from other narrators.

It's been about a week since I finished and I took a break to listen to something else, but I'm dying to get back to this. I think I'm even going to buy the physical book because I definitely want to read or hear this again now that I know what's happened.

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