A worthy sequel to The Martian. While it does involve peril in space, there is an ensemble cast--not to mention a female lead. Jazz Bashara is a smuggler who is hired to commit a crime on Artemis, the human habitation on the Moon. It turns out that the crime involves her in a power struggle that goes right to the political basis of the colony--far more than she bargained for. The caper itself is a pulse-pounding action scene, with the added spice of a decidedly inhospitable landscape.

“I received this book for free from NetGalley for this review.”

I'll admit that I preferred The Martian, but this one was not bad. I would hope for more like his first in the future.

First, let me say that before The Martian was released I was chomping at the bit to get me hands on it! Not being an avid reader of sci-fi, I was nervous, but took a chance and as luck would have it, The Martian didn't disappoint. It became not only one of my favorite reads in 2014, but one of my favorite science fiction reads period! With that said, yes, I had high hopes for Andy Weir's second novel, Artemis. Unfortunately, luck was not with me the second time around.

Artemis is a futuristic story about a heist that takes place in the only city on the moon. Our protagonist is Jazz Bashara, is a smart girl, but also a small time smuggler. Jazz is offered the opportunity to take part in a crime that would set her up for a very comfortable life. The only thing is, pulling off this "job" will be nearly impossible.

Unlike, The Martian, which hits the ground running, Artemis is an extremely slow burn. The world building was mediocre at best. I would have loved more detail about the colony on the moon. The science that was very relevant to Weir's first novel, seemed a secondary thought to this storyline. It was somewhat important, but not nearly as interesting. The same goes for the main character. Mark Watney, was smart, sarcastic , and lovable. Jazz, just didn't seem as authentic. The sarcasm that was adorable in his first book, just felt snarky and forced this time around. Jazz didn't seem real, she felt like a character that a male author, who hasn't had meaningful relationships with women, was guessing at. It was like he didn't know how a smart and independent woman should speak and behave, it felt forced and artificial.  

Once the story hit it's climax (a boring one mind you), it had been such a monotonous journey that I just wanted it to be over. A forced (fake) female lead, boring science, not enough awesome details about life on the moon, and plenty of cringe-worthy attempts at humor that all too often fell short...I'm sad to say I didn't enjoy this one.

Really enjoyed this book. It has its flaws - mainly that Jazz sometimes comes across as a man's idea of what a strong female character should be. That issue aside... this book is just fun. It's an enjoyable, fast read with enough science to make the plot seem fairly plausible. A geeky beach read.

I received a promotional copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Remember how much fun The Martian was? This isn't that fun. There's still Wacky Hijinx In Space (TM), but it's not the same level of "oh man, this is great" that The Martian was. Jaz, to me, reads very much as a woman written by a man (and my husband noted this too), and it pulled me out of the plot a lot. Everyone wants to sleep with Jaz, she has no friends that she doesn't also use to her advantage, and she's in this mess because she's too proud to apologize.

Fun to read? yes. Written like there's already a screenplay coming? YES. Am I going to read it again?
no.

Jasmine Bashara is a young bad-ass smuggler who moved to the moon colony of Artemis at age 6, so Artemis is the life she knows and loves. Well, she loves her life, but would like to upgrade from her coffin-like bed room. For that she needs money. So she agrees to take on some risky (and illegal) propositions.
The narrative is full of action, fast-paced; the dialogue is irreverent. Lots of technical detail added to the realism. Having said that, I have no idea if any of the technical detail was accurate, but it sounded plausible.
I did enjoy this book, but I love sci-fi that asks the big questions about humanity--humankind's place in and responsibility for the universe.
While the storyline did get political, to me the book felt more like and action thriller set on the moon rather than true sci-fi.
Still, highly recommended for readers who are not committed sci-fi nerds.

Before starting this review, it's worth noting that I did not read the Martian (though admittedly it is now on my to read list) and I've only seen pieces of the movie. This book peeked my interest because it's a heist that takes place on the moon. Also the lead character is a 26-year-old FEMALE.

I snagged an advanced reader copy during my last semester of Library school and am just now getting around to reading it. How stupid of me. This book is fantastic in a can't put it down type of way, it hooked me in from the first sentence and carried my interest until the end. There is just enough science to make situations creditable, but not so much that is seems forced or it takes you out of the story. The story pacing is smooth, fast enough so that there is tension and things are happening, but not so fast that scenes are unable to develop.

I love that Jazz is a smart-ass and that she makes mistakes, it's incredibly refreshing to have a flawed female lead. Her motivation is clear, though sometimes selfish, but she still has pride and ethics, though sometimes questionable. Honestly, this is one of the few books I don't want them to make into a movie. It's perfect and I don't want them to change or spin anything. (But if you made it a movie I'd want to go see it, because I'd be crazy not to).

Received from NetGalley for my honest review
Completed 7/10/17 & 2/15/08
322 page ebook

This is NOT The Martian, not even on the same level as The Martian, but it's still a GOOOOD book and it annoys me because people go into this book expecting magic in a bottle again and are disappointed when they don't get it. I don't think The Martain CAN be topped on all the levels it appeals, so expecting that magic again was a too lofty expectation.

Artemis on its own is a good book. Rating system of 1-5 fails in this regard. Is it a 5 star book? If you can only rate 1-5 it sure is. Is it the same kind of 5 star book that The Martian is? Hell no. So, Goodreads falls flat in this regard and that's while you'll see my rose system is more of a 1-11 type rating, rather than 1-5. On this one, if I could rate it 1-10, I'd give it a solid 8.

Jazz is an interesting character. She's flawed but not evil. She just wants to survive in a world where its not easy to survive and everything she's doing is for reasons she finds honorable, even if what she is doing isn't.

I'd definitely recommend this book to fans of heists and moon/space stories. Just don't go in expecting magic and take Jazz for who she is, which is still a really good character. She's not Mark Watney, but I think they'd be friends. :)

Setting = A+
Plot = A
Conflict = A
Characters = A
Theme = A+

I was not a huge fan of 'The Martian' so I tried my best to go into 'Artemis' with an open mind and I am so glad that I did. I really enjoyed Jazz as a character and just the entire concept of having to be a young adult rebelling against a parent ON THE MOON was amusing to me. Of course there are problems to living on the moon. For example: THE MOB. This, too, was a little amusing to me at first, but the book was well written and more than anything, Andy Weir is absolutely a scientist and engineer. This book did not have all the focus on potato poop farming (thank GOD) but instead had a plot line and action and was an entertaining read. It was refreshing. Thank you!

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance digital copy of this book in exchange for my review. Here is my review:

I LOVE Jazz!! She is my favorite lead character in any book so far this year. She is feisty, independent, profane, has NO respect for herself or anyone else, but always gets the job done and saves the day!!

This book is set on the moon, in a colony called Artemis. Jazz moved there with her father when she was a young child, so she is, for all intents, a native of the moon. She knows Artemis and all its secrets like the back of her hand. She easily navigates from the poorest sectors to the richest, and knows inhabitants of both, and all in between. She is CONSTANTLY in trouble, on the verge of homelessness, and broke, but she is very resourceful and finds inventive ways to make money.

Read it - you will like it!!

My review is so late for this book. I LOVED this book. I especially loved it because it had all the science geekery of The Martian with a better main character and a plot. Waiting for the movie already. Jazz Bashara is great! This was fun.

Andy Weir's follow up to The Martian, Artemis is full of his trademark flippant humour, non-stop action and interesting, at times confusing, science.
Jazz Bashara is tough, smart, snarky and beautiful. She has grown up on Artemis, the only city on the moon. She has a penchant for making terrible decisions and is struggling to make ends meet as a porter. However, the porter job gives her access to smuggle in contraband.
Jazz is given the opportunity to commit the perfect crime with a payout too lucrative to turn down. Pulling off the impossible is just the onset of her problems when she learns that she has stepped right into the middle of a conspiracy for control of Artemis. Her only chance of survival lies in a plan even riskier than the first.
A fun and entertaining read!

Thank you to NetGalley and Crown Publishing for an arc of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

"Artemis" eBook was published in 2017 and was written by Andy Weir (http://www.andyweirauthor.com). Mr. Weir has published two novels.

I categorize this novel as ‘PG’ because it contains quite a bit of Mature Language. The story is set in the near future. Earth has established a colony on the Moon where about 2000 people are currently living. The primary character of the story is 20 something Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara.

Bashara has been a rebel most of her short life. She has shown brilliant potential, but has always bucked authority. She makes a living, barely, by being a porter, delivering packages within Artemis, the Moon colony. She has been training to be licensed for EV work, but still hasn't accomplished that. She has established a successful smuggling operation.

One of her clients is the billionaire Trond Landvik. He offers Bashara the opportunity to make some money. A LOT of money. Of course it is going to take Bashara a lot farther over the line of law than she has gone before. Her well laid plans go astray and she soon finds herself on the run for her life. Then things kind of go down hill from there.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 7 hours I spent reading this 322 page science fiction thriller. I like the way Weir writes. He mixes a lot of science into his plots. Too few "science" fiction authors do that these days. I also think that he has developed a very interesting character in Bashara. I would not be surprised to see this transformed for the big screen as was his first novel, "The Martian". The chosen cover art is OK. I give this novel a 5 out of 5.

Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.

My book reviews are also published on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31181778-john-purvis).

This was an incredibly incredulous story. It just kept going a notch up on the ridiculous ladder till I could take it no more.

I didn't finish reading this book because I just couldn't buy into the female main character - didn't seem to be a women's voice or perspective.

Given my deep and abiding love of <i>The Martian</i>; given my nerdy geeky longing for space – the poster I'm looking at right now says "Someday I would like to stand on the moon, look through a quarter of a million miles of space and say, 'There certainly is a beautiful earth out tonight.' -- Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin" – and I mean it, I really, really mean it … Given all that, it was inevitable that I'd instantly request <I>Artemis</i>, wait anxiously for approval, and hope like heck it was great. I'd seen reviews saying that it wasn't in the same league as the first book. But that didn't really matter. I wanted it.

Well, and those reviews - they were right. <i>The Martian</i> was, for me, almost perfect. <I>Artemis</i> had some wonderful things, but on the whole it fell short for me. The depiction of society on the moon was terrific. Weir did a tremendous job of world-building to make something that was utterly familiar and utterly alien at the same time. He was on one of my favorite podcasts <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/28/economy/make-me-smart-kai-and-molly/andy-weir-loves-geek-out-about-space-economics">(Make Me Smart, with Molly Wood and Kai Ryssdal)</a> talking about the economics of living in space or on the moon, and the man has it all thought out.

It's only after having finished the book that I'm a little wistful about the fact that, while there was a bit of "OMG" in the book – Jazz is reminded a few times of how truly awesome, in every sense of the word, it is to live on the moon, and the ability to look up and out and see Earth out there … still, I think what I missed in this book is that nerdy geeky rapture I wanted. Artemis has been there for a while. Jazz grew up there. She has never known anything else, and everyone around her has been there long enough that the novelty has, apparently, sadly, worn off.

And I think that's a shame. I mean … it's <I>the moon</i>. You can step outside and if the rotation is right look up and see the only place humans had previously ever lived, the classic blue marble. (<i>Lene looked up to Trond like he put the Earth in the sky.</i>) And that's <i>magical</i>. I wonder if that's why I'm not more of a science fiction fan in general – I love a lot of the trappings of the genre, but hardly ever read in it. The awe just seems to be so often missing.

And that's not what the book is about. The book is about lunar economics and a heist and science and … economics … About murder and the black market and eking out a living and frittering away potential.

Honestly, I think that last part, and the whole heist storyline, are what kept me from loving this book. Jazz is hardly unrealistic in her insistence on letting all the very skills and intelligence she's got get blunted and rusty while she scrapes by doing jobs almost anyone could do, or doing illegal jobs… but I found the end of it intensely frustrating. Given my life and situation and desires, and given her possibilities, I wanted to give her a swift kick for her perverse insistence on not doing anything with her abilities, for continuing to live hand to mouth when she had another option sitting waiting for her. If her father had hated her or abused her (which he very much did not: "Very few people get a chance to quantify how much their father loves them. But I did." – One of my favorite bits) … if she had a fear of open flame, or claustrophobia, or something … if there was some even half-baked reason for it, I'd have had a much easier time accepting it. As it is, she just made me angry. Again, this is not unrealistic. But I don't read fiction to watch people make the same kinds of mistakes I have.

Mainly, though, it was the adventure at the climax that made me a little tired and … not bored, exactly, but kind of patiently-waiting-for-the-conclusion. On the one hand it reminded me of a movie from the sixties – a madcap farce, a caper, something that should have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. On the other hand, it was deadly serious – people could have died, lots of them (probably would have died, to be honest – children don't have the tolerance of adults is all I'm going to say).

I appreciated the plotting; I appreciated the writing; I appreciated the depth of world-building (literal and literary). I enjoyed the humor where it came in ("like all good plans, it required a crazy Ukrainian guy") and marked the change in tone; but the whole thing was not what I signed up for.

Still, it was overall very enjoyable. And Jazz (and therefore Weir) is a nerd. The reference to the first Lord of the Rings film was lovely.

The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review. "I thank," I said with a smile. "I thank many. Moon is much excitement!"

I went into The Martian with very low expectations, I think I read it for a challenge, choose a book from a 'best of 2014' list or something. I was very surprised by how much I absolutely adored it and then proceeded to shout my love of it for like, 2 years. So when I saw this on Netgalley, I was so so excited, but I ignored it for several months because I was so afraid it wouldn't compare to The Martian. In all honesty, Andy Weir probably should have pulled a JK Rowling and published this under another name because everyone will compare, and I'm sorry, it just pales in comparison to The Martian and Mark Watney. Which is a bummer, obviously. I liked the overall story and I was definitely interested, I just would have liked more from the characters and their relationships (specifically Rudy and Jazz). I also kept forgetting that Jazz was a woman because, sorry if this sounds sexist, she really came across as a man. I'm sure there are women out there that talk and think like Jazz, it just really screamed 'man writing as a woman' to me, and some men shouldn't do that. Goes both ways, I've read books by women that should not write a man's POV. Anyway. I was definitely disappointed by this one in comparison to The Martian, but on its own, it was an enjoyable read that passed the time just fine, I don't regret reading it. I will re-read The Martian one day but I doubt I'd re-read this. I will still keep an eye out for more from this author.

It's refreshing to read a true SF novel. Lately, unless you are reading a book featuring Star Wars or Star Trek, the focus seems to be on fantasy or dystopia. We won't touch on vampires and werewolves, although if that is your pleasure you are in luck.

Artemis by Andy Weir, however, is about life in a man-made city on the moon. The author has created a realistic world with scientific explanations which seem realistic to my untrained mind. Jazz Bashara, the main character, is a true antihero, who at twenty eight is still acting like a rebellious teenager doing a little smuggling, along with her day job as a porter, to pay for her meager lifestyle. She manages though dreams of something better - a bigger bed, her own bathroom, better food choices - all beyond her financial means. Then the deal of a lifetime falls into her lap, a way to make some real money and maybe repair the broken relationship with her dad. This one requires quite a bit of planning and luckily she has a natural ability to pick up information on the fly along with some innate skills perfected at her father's knee as well as the general knowledge necessary to nullify the safeguards surrounding the moon's life support systems (without getting herself killed). Yet the relatively "simple" task of sabotage becomes a deadly game placing those she holds near and dear in danger. Time to call in all her favors, even if it means swallowing her pride and overriding her principles.

Add in a stoic father who wants what's best for his only daughter, a former best friend who has the same taste in men, a geeky coworker willing to lend a hand, a security officer just looking for a reason to deport her back to earth, a childhood pen pal from Kenya who has some helpful connections, and a client who inadvertently bites off more than he can chew.

While I enjoyed the basic concept and liked the mystery tour Weir took us on, there was a bit too much technical detail for my taste. I like a bit of science to make it all seem doable, but my focus is always on the fiction. However, the action will translate into a great movie, since this novel has just as much big screen potential as The Martian. Creating a female main character seemed to be a bit of a challenge for Weir and she came off a little too juvenile at times, though her glib, wise cracking attitude along with all those smarts were a refreshing change of pace which lead to some clever, if somewhat cliched, dialogue.

I'm ready to purchase my ticket.

Four stars and a thank you to Netgalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed the film The Martian based off of Andy Weir's other novel, so I was really excited to give this one a try. Unfortunately, I don't think that Artemis and I clicked very well. I didn't really connect with or like Jazz very much, and the writing just didn't work for me as a reader. I was sad that I didn't enjoy this as much, but I can definitely see where other readers would fly through this and love it!

This thriller wasn’t dystopian or too far into the future for me to feel like it couldn’t have been happening right now. Artemis is a colony on the moon, but it’s still new enough to be compared to a Disney resort for most people that still reside on Earth. This story begins with a Han Solo-esque woman working a heist gone wrong before turning into a total page turner full of assasins, organized crime, business conspiracies, and crazy MacGyver-in-space style solutions.