[3.5]

If I hadn't been spoiled (by my own choice) about this book it would have been a DNF. I think my biggest problems lie with believability. I constantly lost immersion and if the following things bother you maybe strongly consider whether or not you want to bother with this:
- Memory loss doesn't work like that. For a book so preoccupied with trying to make things make sense this seemed like a huge oversight. You can't have magically convenient flashbacks that are always linear in a book preoccupied with realism.
- Things were over-explained. I think it may be a me problem that I didn't need to have the science behind things explained constantly, it felt like it dragged everything to a halt when I was here more for the plot. The problem solving aspect of the science would be fine in smaller doses but it makes up 80% of a reasonably long book. I also was constantly thinking about if any of it was actually realistic or not.
- the 'things going wrong' aspect of the plot just got so repetitive. It's my biggest problem with sci-fi in general. It didn't help that a lot of the problems were very minor and either didn't need to be solved or simply had no impact on the wider plot and started to feel like filler episodes in a tv show.
- apparently the main character knows how to do bloody everything. He started to feel like a Gary Sue. He's just so special uwu! He's always there for everything important in flashbacks to earth and he knows so much science completely unrelated to his specialty of microbiology and I don't buy the high school science teacher thing, sorry

Other more minor complaints is that this book wasn't nearly as humorous as the blurbs made it out to be, that or I just didn't get the humour. The writing style also wasn't for me. It uses a lot of very simple sentence structures throughout and the explanations of how things look also felt overly simplistic. For me personally I kind of wanted more out of the writing 'cause sometimes it felt like the book was treating me like an idiot and this is adult sci-fi. Without spoilers: the linguistic aspect of this book had me rolling my eyes but I luckily could mostly accept it.

I DID LIKE SOME THINGS THOUGH. However they all fall into spoiler territory. As minimally as I can say it, I liked the dialogue and interactions in the book. I also found the ending very satisfying!

I think for such a popular and well-loved book I'm shocked by how much I didn't enjoy this at times. I also thought it was way too long. However, there were still aspects that I liked enough that it bumped up my rating a bit.