A review by tome15
Starship Repo by Patrick S. Tomlinson
3.0
Tomlinson, Patrick S. Starship Repo. The Breach No. 2. Tor, 2019.
Now let us praise average books. That is to say, I am tempted to rate this comic space opera higher than it deserves because it got so many negative reviews it did not deserve. But I will restrain myself. Starship Repos could be the poster child for three-star novels. Many of the negative reviews seem to have been given by readers who did not know what to expect. But really, if you pick up a book called Starship Repo, should you expect complex plotting and deep character analysis? At one point, our heroine, a refugee thief and con artist trying to survive in a multispecies habitat, tells an alien who doesn’t get it to keep track of his bath towel. It would be fair to say that Repo is not as much fun as Hitchhiker’s Guide, But then, few novels are. It does have an engaging heroine who seems to adjust well to repossessing starships for a gang of bug-eyed monsters. Some jokes are duds, but some give me a chuckle. I even enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek acknowledgements where the author says that his editors and typesetters are responsible for all the faults in the novel which would otherwise have won a Nobel prize. Some of Tomlinson’s harshest critics seem to think he was really gunning for the Nobel.
Now let us praise average books. That is to say, I am tempted to rate this comic space opera higher than it deserves because it got so many negative reviews it did not deserve. But I will restrain myself. Starship Repos could be the poster child for three-star novels. Many of the negative reviews seem to have been given by readers who did not know what to expect. But really, if you pick up a book called Starship Repo, should you expect complex plotting and deep character analysis? At one point, our heroine, a refugee thief and con artist trying to survive in a multispecies habitat, tells an alien who doesn’t get it to keep track of his bath towel. It would be fair to say that Repo is not as much fun as Hitchhiker’s Guide, But then, few novels are. It does have an engaging heroine who seems to adjust well to repossessing starships for a gang of bug-eyed monsters. Some jokes are duds, but some give me a chuckle. I even enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek acknowledgements where the author says that his editors and typesetters are responsible for all the faults in the novel which would otherwise have won a Nobel prize. Some of Tomlinson’s harshest critics seem to think he was really gunning for the Nobel.