Artemis

From the Publisher: Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she's stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

I am going to make a disclaimer- The Martian is one of my favourite books and movies of all times and I don’t really even like sci-fi fantasy. Was I stoked to see the chance to read “Artemis”? HELL YA … is it as good as “The Martian”? No. But it’s not bad, either. Jazz’s life and adventures on the moon are interesting, especially as they are interspersed with letters back and forth to a pen-pal on earth which tell us how she came about smuggling.

Jazz is smart – almost too smart at times and that kind of annoyed me. The science also got VERY technical (which I expected it to, after “The Martian”) but this time my eyes glazed over and I found myself almost wanting to skip over it to the end and it as nice to see an Arab as a main stream character in these fraught times. There are not as many LOL moments that I had hoped for but in the end the book was a very satisfying read. If I could, it would get 4.75 stars but for the sake here, I will give it five (but not my moniker of “freaking awesome books”!)

Thanks to NetGalley for an amazing chance to review a great book that I pre-ordered months ago!