Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
I’m expecting this final chapter to go by pretty quick. I would have read it along with last week’s chapter but my schedule is worse this month than usual so I only had time for the one. Our hero is hot on the trail of the last person we need to find (no spoilers in the intro) and now we just have to get them together.
Given the amount of padding this book has had showing off the worldbuilding at the expense of the pacing I’m guessing that’s what we’ll get, given that it’s a full chapter length. Still, it’s time to finish this book and the next one is chosen. With that let’s see how Jake gets his woman.
The good news is that I was wrong, and the only worldbuilding we get is more like place setting, something the book really should have done instead of showing off their concepts, many of which are outdated in a rather short amount of time. I’m reviewing this in 2023 and this edition came out in 1990, having come out originally a year earlier. Even the parts they got right were fancy-named. I imagine the “cellphone” would have been called a “pocket comp” or something. Look at the pocket computer back in the 1980s or the netbooks of the late 1990s, or even the PDAs of the early 2000s. They didn’t need silly sci-fi names. “Personal Digital Assistant” said it all.
We have three segments. The first is just Jake and Sid wrapping up Jake’s character arc; how he’s going to stay on with Cosmos for future books and spin-off media, the situation with is ex-wife and his desire to be part of his son’s life again, questions about whether he’ll be cleared with Hokori dead and Sands in a coma, how Kittridge is claiming he was kidnapped, and that Sid promises not to get hurt again. If I ever get to read the next books in the series we’ll see how long that lasts. Plus Sid argues with the kitchen appliances for a bit of fun.
The next segment is just them landing and using their cover stories. Not much there.
Finally we get the meeting with Jake and the real Beth Kittridge. There’s not much there either but I don’t know how you’d really add anything else. Jake finds the cabin, introduces himself to Beth, she thinks she knows him from somewhere (Jake sure he dreamed her at one point but Beth also believing she’s seen her is something that could be followed up on), and Jake about to tell her about his experiences with Bethdroid. Jake did admit earlier that he did like Bethdroid, which given his history with robots noted earlier is another bit of character growth. It’s a decent ending but at least on my end I wish I could have read it last week since it’s more like an epilogue than a final chapter.
I’ll give my overall thoughts in a full book report over at The Clutter Reports, but overall I actually enjoyed the book. The pacing was a problem thanks to showing off the worldbuilding but in the end a good read I hope to read again in the future. Next week we start a whole new book, a spiritual sequel of sorts to a book I’ve reviewed before. Bring your parachutes because we’re in for a fall. See you then, same BW time, same BW Media Spotlight.
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