Book Review: Artemis by Andy Weir

 

  

My Rating: 5 of 5 bright shiny stars

Publish Date: November 14, 2017

Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure

Books Like This: The Martian

I am so excited to share my book review with you!

A heist story set on the moon.

I dove into this book without any expectations. I have not read The Martian. I do not know anything about Andy Weir. And I usually avoid science fiction novels. But the plot is intriguing so I decided to give this a try.

I was hooked at the first chapter and I would have read this book in one setting if I could.

Artemis is the first and only city on the moon. The whole city is a half a kilometer across. It’s made of 5 spheres called “bubbles” and it looks like a bunch of domes. The Armstrong bubble sits in the middle, surrounded by Aldrin, Conrad, Bean and Shepard. The bubbles are connected through tunnels and looks like some balls and sticks. The lunar time matches the time of the country Kenya on Earth . Artemis has about 3,000 residents and a lot of rich tourists.

Jazz Bashara is a longtime resident of Artemis. Sounds glamourous, right? We quickly learn that even on a lunar colony there are the Haves and the Have Nots, and just like Earth, this society has greed, manipulation, politics, crime, and corrupt individuals driven by money. But it also has just enough order, human kindness and decency woven in to make it tolerable for its inhabitants.

Jazz is a Have Not, and a part of the working class that runs Artemis. She works as daytime porter supplementing her meager income with a side job as a smuggler. You want illegal contraband like booze or cigarettes? Jazz can get it to you…. for a price. A rich businessman offers her one million “slugs” (moon currency) for a quick and easy but very illegal job. She is halfway through the job and daydreaming of how she’ll spend that money when things go horribly and unexpectedly wrong. And then she is on the run.

But not to worry, because Jazz is street and book smart (a rare combination), sassy, self-deprecating, determined, resourceful, connected, a problem solver, and fast on her feet thanks to 1/6 gravity. She is a firm believer in commitments. She is loyal and mostly moral even though she bends the law from time to time. She is a fun and likeable character with many flaws.

Andy Weir does a fantastic job of explaining Artemis’s backstory so that the reader has a clear picture of it. He writes an action packed thriller and makes science easy to understand. The physics and chemistry references don’t weight the book down at all and I hardly noticed that I was learning something. A nice benefit.

I love Artemis for so many reasons:

1. Awesome snarky, smart female Macgyver-esque badass main character
2. Diverse, entertaining, and well developed supporting characters
3. Action packed twists and turns
4. Stellar writing style
5. Laugh out loud humor
6. Weir’s vision of the lunar colony lifestyle

This book is an unexpected gem. It is one of my top five books of 2017. The writing is phenomenal, the plot is fast paced, the characters are well developed and interesting, and the setting is unusual and very memorable. If everyone wrote like Andy Weir, I would read more science fiction books. He is truly talented and I look forward to his next book already.

I am thrilled and honored to receive this ARC. Thank you Netgalley, Crown Publishing and Andy Weir.