Zoe's Tale
Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
I lied last night. Well, it technically wasn't a lie, because I thought I was so tired that I wouldn't make it past a few pages in the book I was reading.
Darn you, John Scalzi. I ended up finishing Zoe's Tale. Good thing Paul put the fixin's for a large pot o' coffee on the timer last night.
Today is the official release date for the book, but there were copies available at ArmadilloCon over the weekend.
Zoe's Tale is set in the Old Man's War universe. It's a standalone novel, but also a companion to the series. There's a point in The Last Colony where events move fast, and it's clear (to me, anyway) that some almost critical part of the story was missing. At the end of this book the author mentioned that it would have taken a 30,000 word tangent to explain everything that had happened at that juncture in the other book. And trust me, that would have been a bad spot for the plot to suddenly veer 90 degrees off course. I'd have been screaming for him to get on with it, already.
The story not only fills that gap, but it tells the story of Zoë Boutin Perry from her POV. Of course, all children are special, but how many do you know that are a treaty condition? I won't go into the entire backstory, but Zoë is acompanied almost everywhere by a pair of rather intimidating aliens. As one might expect, that sort of puts a kink in her plans to lead a normal teenage life. When she and her adoptive parents (and the aliens) pull up stakes and travel to a new seed colony on a far away planet, all you-know-what breaks loose.
I'm not going to digress into the entire backstory, partly because OMW is a popular series and one or two of my three readers already know. The other is that I don't want to spoil too much of the plot. That would be wrong.
Zoe's Tale is aimed at teenagers, but adults (particularly those who read the OMW series) won't be turned off by it. In fact, if you've read the other books in the series (The Last Colony, in particular), you'll want to read this to find out exactly what happened when Zoë went off-planet and ... oh, that would be telling. If you've never read any of the other books in the series, there's enough backstory to get you in the loop, but not enough to bog down the story. One of the challenges of writing a story like this is keeping those who have read the rest of the series engaged. It certainly worked for me. If you've read the rest of the series you know how it's going to end, but getting there from a different angle is just as much fun.
I highly recommend this book.
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