Review: All Systems Red

All Systems Red by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I want to love this book. I do love Murderbot, and the little glimpses of their humor we get to see. They definitely read autistic to me, and I just want to wrap them in a cozy blanket and let them watch TV and make everything okay. (As someone who's had her life decided for her, I thought the ending was perfectly executed.)

But their humor is sporadic and the prose is often dry and "tells" rather than "shows." (I usually hate that rule because it can be broken amazingly well, but this is not one of those times.)

And there are times when the prose seems to slip into present tense and others where they really need a comma or two to clear up sentences that are long but they don't have commas making me very irritated.

The human characters all felt the same to me. Like, I'm reasonably sure Gurathin is a jerk and Rathi likes Murderbot, but I couldn't tell you a damn thing about any of them. I'm not even sure of their genders half the time because they're all so forgettable. Part of that is my personal dislike for books that only give characters last names, but I feel it's also the characterization.

That's not to say it was a bad book. It was really entertaining and a fast read. I just didn't fall in love with it.

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