Chad’s Reviews > Uhura's Song > Status Update

So close to finishing this and finally we have some substantive progression of the plot. And unrelated but clearly I need to disconnect my kindle from my goodreads account. This is the third time it auto-updated me as finishing the book when I clearly have not.

I’m not quite at the halfway point and I feel like my progress bar should be closer to 80%. There has to be some kind of movement with this story because I’m running low on stamina. The two cultures don’t understand each other easily. I get it.

This is getting seriously painful. I feel like I’m reading the same chapter over and over again. We get -at best- a paragraph or two showing McCoy working at trying to beat this disease and then we plunge right back into this endless sleepover that the rest of the crew is having on the other planet.

Also if my f*cking kindle would stop auto-updating when I don’t want it to maybe my reading activity wouldn’t show that I’ve finished the book three or four times this week.

This book is in serious need of an edit. Way too long. Pretty much any sense of narrative pacing has been completely lost at this point and I’m kind of wondering why we need that plague event as a part of the story at all. There are barely even any scenes sowing McCoy trying to deal with the disease.

I appreciate the anthropological detail and credibility that this story brings to bear but I feel like it’s overly long. All these long-winded passages about the construction of their names kind of kills the tension we are supposed to be feeling related to a devastating plague event on the planet we started this book on.

My hope is that we get some forward progress in the story because the last few chapters have begun to feel a little tedious and my enthusiasm for the book is waning a bit.

While I appreciate the notion of these two cultures meeting and exploring each other and the process of trying to talk one planet’s population into helping to deal with a plague on another, the massive number of characters involved make that aspect of the story feel overly dense and I have been tuning it out at times.

I’m kind of mixed on the first contact aspects of the story. I’ll admit that it’s interesting but it’s also a bit tedious at the same time.

The author has chosen some of the most irritating names I’ve ever seen. First a planet named Eeiauo? A character named Snnanagfashtalli? I’m all for being creative but it’s like someone spilled the contents of a Scrabble box into my kindle.