Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't disagree. I just find the constant use of these terms unnecessarily childish. Why not say "I was ravenous"? "I was suddenly keenly aware of my own hunger" "I had reached the table and brought a bun to my mouth before I had even thought about it"? Or any of a dozen other ways to write the sentence?
I don't know if you have read Weir, but this book at least is replete with a goofy humor that for me at least falls very flat. He is a bestseller so maybe there's a wide audience for this type of writing. I'm not part of it.
The protagonist a scientist burnout who literally became a children's school teacher. His train of thought is not quite "Sunday School teacher for ten-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may just never start cursing to begin with, but it's pretty solid as "late-career-change teacher for eleven-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may find themselves at work saying "What the he ... ck" so often that the euphemisms replace the original habit.
To each their own, though. I didn't like his second book, Artemis, for what I thought of as an incoherence along those lines; the main plot could have come out of a 1950 Boy's Life sci-fi adventure, while one or two of the side plots were R-rated, so it didn't work for me as adult fiction or young adult.
But in Hail Mary the goofy humor is what keeps the whole thing tonally coherent for me; it bridges the gap between the very dark plot points (where it works as gallows humor) and the very lighthearted plot points (where it works straight).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link