Zoe's Tale

by John Scalzi

I actually didn't think I wanted to read this book. I was wrong. I should have known better and had more faith in Scalzi because this book is absolutely something that I wanted to read, whether I knew it or not. I didn't think I wanted to read it because I knew it was just a retelling of The Last Colony from Zoe's perspective and, as much as I love both The Last Colony and Zoe, I wasn't very interested in rereading that. Then my brother read it and advised that I read it, too. Thank god I bought him all of the first four books for Christmas! I took his advice and I am immensely glad that I did.

Scalzi, like the true artist he is, manages to tell an entirely different story while retelling a story he's already written. There is a minimum of repeated scenes (like, maybe two) and he does an excellent job of glossing over all of the stuff we saw last time. Instead, he focuses on Zoe's perspective and the things going on in her life that her parents never knew about. Also the things that they kind of knew about but only vaguely, which was awesome.

She is also an awesome character and I fully enjoyed reading about her. In his acknowledgements, Scalzi admits that he had trouble with her voice since he doesn't actually have much experience being a teenage girl *gasp* so he recruited help from some of the women in his life. For the most part, I did find her to be a very believable teenage girl, if a bit too mature for her age. Yes, I know there are always the children who act older than they are but, at a certain point, the hormones just take over. There are a number of scenes with the Obin in particular where she manages not to fly off the handle because she knows it won't do any good and I had a little bit of a hard time swallowing that. Maybe she just has more practice with the Obin than most of us but, in my experience, knowing that getting angry won't do any good and actually not getting angry are two very different things. Times ten when adolescent hormones are racing through your body and you don't have time to sleep (which she apparently didn't). On the other hand, whiny teenage girls aren't very likable interesting to read about so Scalzi is forgiven.

That being said, all the fantastic elements of The Last Colony are also present here. It is fast-paced and action-packed with a minimum of unnecessary information or anything to slow down the story. I was also surprised and glad to see Scalzi go from third person limited to first person, which is really saying something because I don't normally like first person narration.