Unfortunately I just think me and V.E. Schwab are not destined lovers and that is A-OK! 

For me, however, this book was not interesting or compelling. I didn't like either Victor or Eli (who I presume are the titular Villains of the series) and neither of them had motivations that particularly compelled me. In fact, both of them pretty much just seemed like white men who feel that power and influence is owed to them for no other reason than because they want it... Is that the point? Maybe that's the point, but if so I didn't think the commentary was delivered effectively enough for the message to land.

Mostly I just spent my time reading of this book wondering when either of these two dudes was going to do something that made me feel like I actually cared about what they were up to.

I did like the side characters though! I liked Mitch and Sydney and the dog, and honestly I did think that the idea behind this book was interesting -- just that the two main characters weren't compelling enough to carry it for me. Alas! 

Many of the criticisms I see of this book have to do with "nothing happens." And honestly, in a way I agree! If you're the type of reader who is looking for action and a climax and a resolution, this really might not be the book for you, and that's totally fine. But I also don't think it's entirely fair to say that nothing happens.

This book was strangely both disquieting and oddly comforting for me. The premise is pretty straightforward, I guess: a group of women are kept in a cage guarded by men. The older women in the group remember life before the cage, but the narrator, who was either born in the cage or was a very young child upon arrival, has no such memories. Eventually, the women break free of their captivity and emerge out into a desolate, empty world, where they appear to be the only survivors.

There is no explanation given for why the world is how it is, or how the women ended up in the cage. Many of the questions a reader might naturally ask about the setting are never answered. And to me, it felt like that might have been the point, a little bit. The novel seemed to me to be an exploration of what it means to take control of your own life, even if that's desolate and frightening to do, because the alternative is so much worse. 

For me personally, it did help to contextualize the contents of this novel to know that Jacqueline Harpman's father was a Dutch-born Jew, and that she and her family fled to Casablanca during World War II; they didn't return until after the war ended, and much of her paternal family died in Auschwitz. I think knowing that made the bleakness of the novel make so much more sense -- this idea that it's better to take hold of your own destiny no matter how desolate it might be than to remain at someone else's mercy even if it's comfortable to do so.

This is definitely a quiet novel and does not contain much by way of action. It's extremely introspective about human nature, in particular women, and how women might act under circumstances like these. It left me feeling sort of unsettled but not entirely in a negative way, and is absolutely a book I'll be thinking about for a long time to come.

As someone who is not particularly science-minded myself, I sometimes find myself steering away from hard sci-fi because I'm worried about not understanding it. My godmother encouraged me to read this book ahead of the movie coming out, and although I was initially a little reluctant, I'm really glad that I did -- and that my worries about not being science-y enough to understand the book were unfounded!

This was my first Andy Weir book so I'm not sure how well this conclusion carries across his other works, but at least within this book I felt that although the science was well-founded and seemed realistic enough (to my untrained eye, anyway) it was also explained in such a way that it was easy to understand. I didn't feel like the explanations went completely over my head -- I was able to follow the logic and the explanations and more or less understand why a plan would or wouldn't work. Maybe this is in part because the narrator is a science teacher and he's explaining things to people who aren't scientists themselves... Whatever the reason, it super helped!

Another thing I found interesting was the way that the gaps in the narrator's memory are slowly filled in over the course of the book. Obviously the stakes for the mission are extremely high, so it's not possible for him to just sit around waiting to remember things -- he has to get to work and then also remember as he goes, which means by the time he finally remembers everything about the events leading to his participation in the mission, we're already in deep. That was a really effective narrative technique here, in my opinion.

My only mild gripe is with the ending -- I honestly, really and truly didn't think we needed the last chapter... But that's fully just because of my preference for storytelling, and it did not at all impact my enjoyment of the rest of the book. (Besides, it wasn't like I HATED the last chapter, I just think it might have been a little more punchy without it!) 

Overall, I'm glad I took my godmother's advice and I think this would be a great hard sci-fi book for someone like me who doesn't often pursue hard sci-fi out of fear of not understanding.