A little Book Chat before the weekend! Posting is light on the blog this month as I get a ton of work done.

PROJECT HAIL MARY by Andy Weir (ebook)

I pre-ordered this one because I loved THE MARTIAN and ARTEMIS, and the story of PROJECT HAIL MARY did not disappoint. It was science and humor and emotion all the way through. I enjoyed the mixed time sequences of the story, jumping back and forth from present to past. I felt like they really kept the story moving. Rocky was my favorite character, of course. And solving the Astrophage mystery was exciting! The ending especially tugged at my heart. It was very satisfying.

I have to make a few notes about the editing of this book, though. (I hate doing this and being negative, but…) I have never seen so many exclamation points in a book in all my life. In a book this size, there should have been 20 to 40, tops. There were maybe 20 on each page. And then using ?! too? No. Just no. I felt like I was being shouted at the entire time. Also there were other mistakes like the wrong sequence of names in a sentence. One sentence started with, “I and the other science leads…” Nope. It should be, “The other science leads and I…” YOU never go first. Ugh. I thought this was published by a traditional publisher. Did they just forget to edit it? I don't know. It took me 70% of the book to finally ignore the exclamation marks. The other stuff just made me groan. It's tough to be an editor and read books like this.

But regardless of the editing (really), I still highly recommend this books if you love science-heavy sci-fi with humor. This one fit the Andy Weir brand.