Vessel

This book was chosen by a bookclub I follow. I wasn't really sure if I would like it, but I got the book, read the first page....and seemed to loose time. When I became aware of my surroundings it was late at night and I had finished the book!

I would seek counselling but I'm sure they'd just tell me that it's a normal reaction...

A darn good book, and joking aside - yes I read it all.

I loved the first 200 pages of this book. It was well-paced with great characters and a brutal look at PTSD. In some ways, it reminded me of Stephen King's “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.” In that book, the mundane story is more interesting than the monster. In this one, the actual struggles of Catherine are even more engaging than the alien subplot for a long time.

Which made it much more disappointing when the book approached the last third, and the ending was just devastatingly dull. Not to mention, there's a ham-fisted love plot that is supremely uninteresting. This book had a lot more potential than it ended up delivering on for me.

I've heard several folks poo poo the book, around the valid science. I however don't have alot of science backgrounds so that didn't bother me. I did find it took longer than I liked to find out what the mystery was. The reveal worked well for me; I found the further into the book I got the faster I wanted to read.

Intriguing And Well Thought Out. This book by debut author Lisa A Nichols can give Andy Weir a run for his money as a less technical yet still very well thought out and crafted story of a lone survivor in space. While NASA themselves likely won't be very happy with this book, it actually works well in presenting both the good and bad of the organization and of humanity generally. Highly recommended.

Executive Summary: I thought this book started slow and ended fast. The middle was good, but overall it made for a so-so book.

Full Review
I'm not sure if this is a book I would have picked up myself. I hadn't heard of it before it was chosen as the July pick for Sword & Laser, and the blurb didn't really excite me much.

I'm not a hard sci-fi person by any means, but I do like for the science to be explained in a way I can follow and doesn't distract me. That is probably harder in a near-future book like this, where it's easier to see how we could get from here to there.

This book focuses more on the human aspect of being an astronaut than the technology side, but the sci-fi aspect plays an important role with how it ends. I felt like a lot of that was rushed and not at all earned by what came before it.

I think the middle of the book is where it shines best when you're focused on the aftermath of such a long time spent in space, and this mystery hanging over the main characters head.

I think it took too long to start revealing the details of that mystery though which lead me to feel like the reveal was rushed and unearned.

Overall I'm glad I read this book, but I wasn't blown away by it. Things set up for a possible sequel, but I'm happy to leave things off where they are.

Pros: great depiction of trauma, compelling story, interesting characters

Cons: not sure I believe the ending

Acting Commander Catherine Wells is the sole survivor of the presumed lost Sagittarius mission to TRAPPIST-1f, a planetary system on the other side of a warp hole. Her sudden return to Earth means NASA can better prepare the soon to depart Sagittarius II crew. Or it would, if she could remember what happened on the alien planet.

This is a quick read. The characters are all interesting, with the majority of the story focusing on Catherine returning to a husband and daughter who believed she was dead the past 6 years. There's a lot for the book to unpack and the author does an excellent job of showing Catherine's trauma regarding memory loss, extreme isolation for an extended period of time, survivor's guilt for being the only member of her crew to survive, as well as the guilt over having been away from her family for so long.

The current memory lapses she has makes for a compelling storyline and I found myself rushing ahead to find out what was going on. I loved the periodic flashbacks to what happened on the Sagittarius I mission.

Once I found out what was happening some of that compulsion to finish the book dissipated. The closer the book got to the ending the less I believed how the higher ups at NASA were acting. The final acts of the protagonists seemed highly implausible and I had trouble believing NASA would go along with it considering the cost and time involved in implementing their plan.

On the whole it was an entertaining read, with some interesting twists though a somewhat unsatisfying ending.

I got an hour into this, but this feels too lightweight on both the scifi and the literary scale. A lost astronaut unexpectedly returns to earth, no one knows what happened to her. Not even her, but she's got a secret she's not sharing, which is annoying because we are experiencing the story from her perspective. Also she just called her NASA investigative operative “cute”, so I will stop this now.