For Jazz Bashara, life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, could be better. Working as a porter barely covers the basic necessities so Jazz does a bit of smuggling in her spare time. When Jazz is offered the opportunity to make more money than she can imagine, she jumps at the chance. She might be breaking the law big time, but if she can pull this off it will all be worth it. Unfortunately, things go wrong and Jazz finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that could cost her her life.
There’s a lot of world building in the beginning of this book; since the story takes place on the moon, we have to learn all about the moon and how stuff works there. We have to learn the layout of everything and how people go through day to day life on the moon and what things are and what they mean. There’s a lot of explaining that goes on.
The narration was in first person, just like The Martian, and a lot of the time Jazz seems like she’s talking right to the reader. However, this didn’t really work for me. In The Martian, it was almost like diary form so I got why Mark Watney seemed to be talking to the reader. Here, I just found it to be a bit tiresome. While it worked well as a narration device because Jazz would explain everything to the reader, by the end of the book, I didn’t like it.
I was also extremely confused about Jazz’s age. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how old she was supposed to be. From her thoughts and dialogue, I thought she read as a teenager but we later learn that she is 26. I felt that Andy Weir did not do a great job of writing Jazz; she just didn’t sound like a 26-year-old female.
Although I thought this book took a while to get into and despite my objections above, once the book got going and the action started I was hooked. I liked the heist and the action and yes, at one point, I was a little worried as to how Jazz and her friends were going to pull everything off. I also learned a lot more about welding than I probably needed to. Welding is to Artemis as duct tape was to The Martian – it solves everything!
If you liked The Martian and you liked Mark Watney and want to read about a female Mark Watney who welds, you would probably like this book.
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