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thistlechaser
First Date by Rex Burke.
Quick synopsis: Set before the Odyssey Earth trilogy, this story covered the hiring of the captain and the building of the ship.
Brief opinion: I had loved the first book of the trilogy (reviewed here), but each of the two following books went downhill. This story was more like the first book than the later ones.
Plot: Set on Earth, the first interstellar ship is being built. The company needs to hire a captain (who we later meet in the trilogy) and to train up the most advanced AI ever made.
Writing/editing: Both were fine. This was a very short book. I always feel a little bad about counting those in my book count for the year, but I have no other way to track them. The Stephen King book I read earlier this week balances it out.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: It was nice seeing the characters again, but these are supposed to be funny, feel good stories and they really are neither.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - 4 stars, liked
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DNF #40: Extinction by Douglas Preston. Every now and then (thankfully very rarely) a man writes a female character and it feels kind of gross. He focuses on her looks, on how "horny" (the author's word) she is... This book was like that. If the story had hooked me I might have stuck with it, but I didn't like the characters or the story (a murder happened in
Extinction did make me glad how rare that "gross" feeling is in the books I read.
DNF #41: Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis. This was a fun idea for a story (set in the future, a top of the line spaceship acts as a luxury hotel), but the writing just so did not work for me. All the characters seemed like stereotypes, and not even accurate ones at that! Every chapter was about a different member of the hotel staff, but none of the chapters were connected. I didn't buy a lot of the basic logic the author used, too. DNF.
