Book Review -- Crater

Crater is set in the 22nd century. After wars ravaged the earth, a few brave souls moved to the moon to mine Helium-3 --a cheap and abundant energy source. The main character, after whom the book is named, is a teenaged orphan who knows and wants nothing more than working on the scrapes, mining heel-3. That is, until the Colonel sends him across the moon as a convoy scout, with order to retrieve an unknown item.

I don't read a lot of science fiction, so I don't have much of a reference to compare this book to. To me, it seemed fairly decent, although it is rightly classified as "juvenile" fiction. It was hard to understand at first, with the random terms thrown in to make the story sound sci-fi. You don't notice after a while, but there are still times when I found myself distracted by the author stopping to describe things. The storyline itself was good, though Crater was unbelievably naive (which was the reason he was sent with the convoy).

The romance that seems to have been thrown in as an afterthought is a different story. Maria hates Crater's guts one minute, and is head-over-heels for him the next. It's never really explained how she changed her mind so fast. The POV of the entire book was a little confusing, because it seemed to be inside the character's heads one minute, and outside the next.

Overall, though, I liked Crater. It was simple enough that I could figure out what was going on, even if it did venture into ridiculous sometimes.


I received this book for free from Booksneeze in exchange for an honest review.