Book Review: Starclimber
And to wrap up the Airborn reviews, here is Starclimber.
Starclimber
Kenneth Oppel
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Summary:
Pilot-in-training Matt Cruse and Kate de Vries, expert on high-altitude life-forms, are invited aboard the Starclimber, a vessel that literally climbs its way into the cosmos. Before they even set foot aboard the ship, catastrophe strikes.
Despite this bombshell, Matt and Kate embark on their journey into space, but soon the ship is surrounded by strange and unsettling life-forms, and the crew is forced to combat devastating mechanical failure. For Matt, Kate, and the entire crew of the Starclimber, what began as an exciting race to the stars has now turned into a battle to save their lives.
Thoughts:
This one I thought was much better than the other two books. The humor was a lot funnier, and I especially loved the monkey who tormented the arrogant scientist. That was brilliant. I didn't expect a lot of the humor, and that's what made it funny. The humor was well spread out throughout the book as well, so it didn't feel like he was trying to be overly funny at times, or not funny at all at others. It was quite good.
The plot had plenty more twists and turns. There was one part where I was thinking that now it's getting interesting! And that feeling kept going till the end of the book, which was excellent. There definitely was parts where I didn't see the plot twists that came rounding the corner at 100.3 mph (the coral reef in the sky, for one example) so that was a thing that boosted the star rating.
There was a death in this book, and since the author did so well with making the characters full of depth in this one, I actually was saddened by the loss. Struck me in the heart, it did.
To put it simply, I thought this book was so much better than its trilogy friends, and if you read this book, I'm positive you'll enjoy it very much.
Star Rating: 4
Personally I liked the second book best, but that's due to my fascination with high places and jumping off of them. This was the book of the series that appeals most to aspiring astronauts-- or as they're called here, astralnauts. But I definitely would have been surprised if you hadn't enjoyed this one.
ReplyDelete*spoilers below*
In this one I thought that some of the plot twists were a little more predictable than in the first two. For instance, Shepherd's buddy (can't remember his name-- started with a B) breaking his arm in the celebration, allowing Cruse to go aboard. That was so obvious to me. Call it reader intuition, but it's hard for me to believe that the author is going to have the MC fail completely with half of the book left. Especially in first-person storytelling. He could get away with it if it was third-person, going along with Kate and leaving Cruse at home-- but he didn't.
And the second thing was just a humorous writer's instinct: when the genius scientist says that nothing can break through their cable, something will. It's a twist on Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong-- except that everything that the characters are sure can't go wrong will go wrong.
Anyway, good review, though I think your reviews on the other two books were unsatisfactory.
Aye, I suppose I might have been a tad too critical on those, but I just found this one more interesting. True, it was a bit predictable that Cruse was going with on the trip and the cable would be broken, but over all this one was my favorite.
DeleteAll books are predictable in their unpredictability. It seems that you highlighted that predictability in the first two reviews, then ignored it in the third book. Yes, there were things that were predictable, but were you able to predict things exactly? Readers' intuition gives us a sense of when a plot twist needs to come, but that doesn't mean you predicted the plot twist-- you just timed it accurately. I think perhaps that was your mistake, but I'm not sure.
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