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Title: The Lives of Tao
Author: Wesley Chu
Genre: Modern day science fiction
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: Hopeless dweeb gets possessed by an immortal alien and forced to become a secret agent.
Thoughts: I'm not sure whether or not this was a good book, but it was a charming one.
There are some structural weaknesses (the bits of flashback at the beginning of chapters always felt unwieldy to me), but I found myself very quickly sucked into Roen's story. He's kind of pathetic--Chu goes perhaps a little overboard in making him pathetic. He has nothing. He hates his job, he has no friends, he has no romantic prospects, he's out of shape and unattractive and relatively poor because he spends all his money trying to anesthetize himself to all of the above. I guess Chu wanted to start as low as possible while still making a redemption somewhat believable.
But I'm a sucker for a good training montage. I found all the alien skulduggery--apparently they've been possessing humans since prehistory, and goading us into building them enough of an industrial base to eventually build them a new spaceship--to be really entertaining if not totally plausible. There are some breakdowns in logic, but I didn't much care--this book is just fun. It's fast and witty and still touching in places. I liked Roen and Tao, and enjoyed spending time in their mutual head. It's an entertaining place to be.
Author: Wesley Chu
Genre: Modern day science fiction
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: Hopeless dweeb gets possessed by an immortal alien and forced to become a secret agent.
Thoughts: I'm not sure whether or not this was a good book, but it was a charming one.
There are some structural weaknesses (the bits of flashback at the beginning of chapters always felt unwieldy to me), but I found myself very quickly sucked into Roen's story. He's kind of pathetic--Chu goes perhaps a little overboard in making him pathetic. He has nothing. He hates his job, he has no friends, he has no romantic prospects, he's out of shape and unattractive and relatively poor because he spends all his money trying to anesthetize himself to all of the above. I guess Chu wanted to start as low as possible while still making a redemption somewhat believable.
But I'm a sucker for a good training montage. I found all the alien skulduggery--apparently they've been possessing humans since prehistory, and goading us into building them enough of an industrial base to eventually build them a new spaceship--to be really entertaining if not totally plausible. There are some breakdowns in logic, but I didn't much care--this book is just fun. It's fast and witty and still touching in places. I liked Roen and Tao, and enjoyed spending time in their mutual head. It's an entertaining place to be.
