‘Zoe’s Tale’ – John Scalzi (Tor Books)

Yesterday I mentioned how I just wanted to put all the sci-fi and horror to one side and get back to reading what I enjoy the most (fantasy!) Today sees a review of a sci-fi book... What happened? To be fair, I’d already spent the last few days reading ‘Zoe’s Tale’ before I felt the urge to go ‘fantasy’ and I’d also felt that I wanted to catch up on at least one ongoing series before the year ended!
I’d had a few misgivings about ‘Zoe’s Tale’ (I’ll go into these later) that had stopped me picking this book up earlier. On the other hand though, the ‘Old Man’s War’ series hadn’t let me down yet so what was I waiting for? I just knew I’d end up reading ‘Zoe’s Tale’ at some point and ‘right now’ seemed as good a time as any to get started.
The bottom line? My misgivings proved to be well founded up to a point, as far as I was concerned, but ‘Zoe’s Tale’ is still worth a read and not just to make up the numbers in the series...

‘Zoe’s Tale’ re-tells the events of ‘The Last Colony’ (the human Colonial Union sets up a colony with the express intention of... I’m not going to say, if you haven’t already read the book then you really ought to!) but this time from the perspective of Zoe Boutin-Perry, adopted daughter of John and Jane Perry. Not only does Zoe add her own unique perspective to events but she is also a major player in her own right and her actions will have great bearing on the direction that humanity’s future takes...

The thing that was stopping me from picking this up originally is the fact that ‘Zoe’s Tale’ retells the events of ‘The Last Colony’, albeit from a different perspective. Did I really want to read the same story all over again? One read later and my mind was changed to an extent... To a large degree ‘Zoe’s Tale’ is ‘The Last Colony’ Mark II, it can’t fail to be anything else purely because of the events that it covers. Sure, it does fill in a few of the gaps that ‘The Last Colony’ skips over but I did end up feeling that I had read all this before...

Where Scalzi rescues things is the character of Zoe herself and what she does throughout the course of the book. Scalzi’s exploration of Zoe’s character brings a freshness to events already told, after three books concentrating on either John or Jane Perry (and I’m counting ‘The Ghost Brigades’, Jared Dirac spent so long trying to discover who he was that he felt to me like he was overshadowed by the well established character of Jane...) it’s refreshing to get to know someone practically brand new. I’ve got no idea how close Scalzi gets to successfully portraying the character of a teenage girl (I’ve got nothing to compare her to) but what I can say is that he succeeds in creating a character whose inquisitiveness, love, courage and loyalty shines from the page and completely had me hooked. While I may have read the story before I couldn’t deny that it deserved to be retold with Zoe taking centre stage.

Scalzi also uses Zoe to fill in gaps in the plot and this gives a more rounded feel to both ‘Zoe’s Tale’ and ‘The Last Colony’. Things that we weren’t able to see from John’s perspective, in ‘The Last Colony’, are covered and questions answered. While this approach does flesh things out a bit I was left questioning how effective it was in certain cases. Now, this is a bit embarrassing but hear me out...
After reading ‘the Last Colony’ I was left grumbling about how the ‘werewolf’ sub-plot was not resolved. This is addressed in ‘Zoe’s Tale’ but is geared around Zoe playing an integral part which I have to admit left me cold. It’s clear how great and important Zoe is, did we need to have this reinforced again in a sub-plot that once again was left hanging (to be fair though, there was a lot of other stuff happening to cause this...)? I didn’t think so...

On top of all this, Scalzi continues to show why he’s an author worth picking up with a trademark plot full of action, intrigue and humour. I knew how ‘Zoe’s Tale’ was going to turn out but the way it was all presented meant that I wanted to stick around and see how it all turned out.
I don’t know if there will be any more books set in this universe but it’s been a great ride and I will certainly come back for more if any more books are published. Hell, I’ll be back for more whatever Scalzi writes...

Eight and a Quarter out of Ten