Zoe’s Tale

This is an interesting experiment: Scalzi tells the story of The Last Colony again, this time from Zoe's perspective. It reads a bit like the second half of a Director's Cut: scenes and thoughts that explain some parts of the first book, but ultimately didn't make the final edit.

Scalzi doesn't stop there, though: as he explains in the acknowledgments, he needed the book to stand on its own feet, so he also tells a story that is separate from the proceedings of the last book, and since it's about a teenager, he wraps it in a coming-of-age tale about finding yourself and standing up for what you've found.

This book may not have a satisfying a plot as the last one, but it seems very personal and can be quite touching. In the way it builds on The Last Colony it manages to add both to that book and to the characters and the universe at large.

I'm not big on re-reading books because my TBR pile is big enough as it is, but I feel like I just got tricked into doing so with this one. This fourth book in this series... just re-tells the same story from the third book, almost scene-for-scene, just from a different character's perspective. Maybe it's just because I don't tend to read book series in general, but this feels like a strange approach to me?

Granted, there was a suspiciously convenient deus ex machina moment towards the end of the previous book, and now we finally get an explanation on exactly what happened because we follow the character responsible for it. Kinda wish we didn't need to re-hash all the previous events from the same starting point to learn all that though. Maybe it's for the best that it's been several real-world months since I've read the previous book because I imagine I would've been more frustrated tackling these back-to-back.

In a vacuum, it's a fine piece of sci-fi with literal aliens and scheming and diplomacy, but it did read like YA because our protagonist this round was a literal teenage girl. And to his credit, the author does mention in the acknowledgements that this was a difficult book to write, specifically because he felt that he had already written it (and I as a reader felt like I had already read it). Taken as part of the larger whole however, I'd probably tell people not to feel bad if they skipped this one.