Zoe's Tale

Old Man's War, Book 4

By: John Scalzi

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history?

I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.

Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don't know my tale: How I did what I did—how I did what I had to do—not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. I'm going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic and wonder, despair and hope. Everything that happened, bringing us to Earth, and Earth out of its captivity. All through my eyes.

It's a story you know. But you don't know it all.

©2008 John Scalzi (P)2008 Macmillan Audio

ignore all the other reviews

I read all the other reviews and decided to read this book anyway and I loved every minute of it it is what it is the story of the young girl from her perspective and feels in a lot of the gaps from the adult book just embrace your inner child and enjoy it as I did

Worth it, don't be fooled into thinking otherwise

Very good take on the same story from The Last Colony but from Zoe's point of view. Explains some things that aren't obvious or explained at all in the previous book and the narrator did a great job interpreting Zoe.

A New World

Creating a universal to be explored. Great concepts to play with and play the author does

I am enjoying the series greatly.

Give it a chance

Slow boring start but it picks up and is entertaining enough, I liked the last quarter of the book the most for sure. Listening to it on 3x speed felt like the right pace though so take it as you will

Re-cap

The Narration was great. Fills-in a lot of gaps the previous book left out. Tells the story in a 16 year old point of view...can be frustrating at times. I will give it to my daughter when she was old enough. Hopefully will get her hooked on sci-if.

Really good. Read this series in order.

Narrator was excellent. Only issue was that she pronounced the names of races and people in the story differently than the narrator of the previous book...which was somewhat jarring.

Slow starter...good payoff.

I recommend this installment for fans of the series. I'm reading them in order. This fourth installment covers the earlier ground but from a different point of view. I found the initial parts of Zoe's Tale to be a little slow and 'young adultish'. But things do pick up considerable as the story progresses. It is a solid addition to the series and provides some interesting information you don't get from the initial recounting of events in the earlier titles in the series.

Oddly Moving

Would you consider the audio edition of Zoe's Tale to be better than the print version?

Absolutely.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Zoe's Tale?

The most memorable moment in Zoe's tale is when she meets the other intelligent life forms on her new planet Roanoke.

Have you listened to any of Tavia Gilbert’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I have never heard her before but she does teenage angst with aplomb.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Enzo, enough said.

Any additional comments?

If you are a Scalzi fan and you have not read this one too, you're missing out.

Great story. Horrible narrator.

I hate the narrator voice. She is terrible and can’t pronounce names properly.

The story was great in every other way.

Good book of the same story from another point of view

Good book. I will say that I was taken back by hearing the same story over that I just read, but after part of the way thru, I started to recognize the fact that a different point of view IS a different story.