My rating: 3 of 5 stars
On the Upside, no one will take your calls.
Prosper Gregory “Spur” Leung wakes up in a hospital. All he can remember is the fire and his skin burning. After the docbot patches him up he makes a few calls and heads home to his farm on the utopia of Walden – a planet being gradually terraformed to forest, orchards, and farms. Those few calls make the homecoming… interesting.
Every time I put this book down I made the same comment, ‘I don’t know what this book is about.’ Even now that I’ve finished I’m still at a loss as to what the point of it all was. In the background, there are some ideas. In the foreground, there is a naive protagonist you could use to explore those ideas, but I’m not sure the ground overlapped at any point.
That isn’t to say that this book isn’t well paced, exciting, and entertaining; it is. There are some interesting themes as well, like environmentalism and competing interests. I breezed through and enjoyed reading the book, but can’t help but feel that the story was missing something.
I received an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Tyson Adams 