{Audio Book} Review: Artemis by Andy Weir || Questionable jokes and a better second half 🎧

Artemis 

Andy Weir

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.

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)

Published: November 14th 2017

This wasn’t on my priority list and the hugely mixed reviews stopped me short of preordering it. But, after The Martian, how could I NOT buy this? And… I had fun. A+ for diversity as well 🙂 .

In the near future, people are living on the moon: Artemis. Jazz Bashara grew up there being a porter who delivers things. Illegally, she makes money on the side with a smuggling business. When a rich customer offers her a get rich quick job doing  a dangerous act of sabotage on a business rival Jazz takes it. Of course, things go awry planned and Jazz has to save Artemis.

I’ll mention this more in the audiobook section of the review, but I liked Jazz’ voice. I know a lot of people found the adolescent humor… not funny? But, I wasn’t bothered until ‘the condom joke’. And calling a niqab a face mask… yikes. I’m a bit ignorant on this subject, but isn’t that a bit… disrespectful? She’s often referred to as promiscuous by many people she runs into, yet she mentions often that she hasn’t slept with that many people. It got kind of annoying.

I’ll admit, she’s no Mark Watney, but I liked her. She was smart and snarky and… kind of like Mark Watney. However, Mark Watney had humor and was likable… Jazz misses that. She’s kind of b*tchy to a lot of the cast we meet, but again, I still liked her. I especially liked her friendship with Kelvin who lived on Earth. It was the small moments we needed as a breather. I also kind of liked her and Dale’s dynamic? He betrayed her in the past and she’s still holding a grudge. And Svoboda? I’d love to see that more developed 🙂 .

I won’t lie, this was a bit infodumpy. There were’t a lot of chapters, but it felt so looooooooong. On top of that, I thought the heist was going to take the whole book, but it happened kind of late? But after the halfway mark, I started loving the book a lot more. Hell, I even started loving Jazz when she became hunted.

Me trying to get into audiobooks more led me to this one here. This book is narrated by the lovely, the wonderful, the amazing Rosario Dawson I love her if you haven’t noticed which probably added to my want to listen to this. When I first started the audiobook, I didn’t imagine Jazz’ voice to sound like what I was listening to. However, after about a page, I loved it. I feel like Dawson’s voice made the jokes doable. I won’t lie, most of my enjoyment was from her reading to me. Usually, when I listen to audiobooks, I have to read with it to keep my focus. But, I was able to multitask while following the story at ease. It was only 17 chapters, 305 pages in my copy and an 8 hour listen, so doing other things helped just a bit to make the book go by.

The last half brought my three star rating to a four. I wouldn’t mind a book two.