Review for "Artemis" by Andy Weir

"When they designed Artemis, someone said, 'What if there's an explosion at the reactor? It's like, a thousand meters from town? That'd be bad, right?' A bunch of nerds furrowed their brows and pondered this. Then one of them said, 'Well... we could put a bunch of dirt in the way?' They gave him a promotion and a parade."



Rating: 4 stars

I was so impressed with this book. It doesn't have as good ratings as Andy Weir's other novel, The Martian (which I haven't read), so I didn't have super high hopes for it, but I am so so glad I read it.
So first of all... Jazz is hilarious. Her personality and narration was what made this book so enjoyable for me. I loved her snarkiness, her sarcasm, her dry humor, her no-BS attitude, and the way she was trying to do the right thing without being pegged as "the good guy". For example, throughout the book she keeps talking about how she needs 416 thousand and some specific amount of slugs (their currency), and in the end (SPOILER) you find out it's to repay her dad for ruining his shop as a teenager, when the whole time she seemed like she couldn't care less about her dad/being a bad daughter. ANYWAY. I love Jazz. The only problem I had with her was that I thought she acted a little bit too young for her age. Making jokes about boobs, handjobs, etc. It's not that I thought the jokes shouldn't have been in the book, I just thought Jazz's age should've been set as 22-23, not 26.
I also really loved Svoboda, but I felt that some of the things that happened were only to advance his character and not anything relevant and it was annoying. Like the thing with the reusable condom? Why did that have to happen at all? Why???
The other problems I had with this book were that I felt like there was not enough explanation of some things, or that the explanations came really late. The world-building itself is pretty good, but I never got answers to: 1) What is EVA? (I had to look it up myself because I'm not a space person) 2) What is KSC? (It may have been mentioned but I didn't catch it), and 3) What year is this set in? They make references to "century old technology" and Clint Eastwood movies, so I wanted to know how far in the future this was supposed to be. I also wondered often about the population of Artemis before it was finally revealed.
I loved the story. I expected a very straightforward space adventure plot, but this one was full of twists with secrecy, crime, murder, betrayal, the whole nine yards. Overall, a really amazing story with fantastic characters, and the narration is wonderful too!