Reviews and Comments

The ending itself was a bit underwhelming. The whole book felt like it's just writing out everything that you probably already guessed was going on in this world. It's still a 4/5 because the whole series and this book wasn't bad, I just expected much more of it, especially because of the hype around it.

Speaking of the series, I don't get why people love it so much. It's just another sci-fi series. The characters weren't outstanding, the story and world-building is okay-ish. It was a fun read, don't get me wrong, but it's not very rememberable. I feel like I could have skipped half the book and it wouldn't even have made any difference.

I would not recommend this book, not because it's bad, but because it's not special or exciting in a way that it stands out from other sci-fi books.

Don't get me wrong, world building is good and Hugh Howey does a good job doing just that, but I didn't get hooked at all. I was looking forward to finishing it. I personally know people that loved it and were happy to start with the next book as soon as they finished this, but that wasn't me.

The story is just dragging along, nothing that exciting going on, the plot is also relatively unsurprising. I started this book and it read like I'm just going through the motions. It's probably just not my jam, but I have to admit, it's well written in a way. I can see what people might enjoy about it.

I am not able to really recommend it, but I can also not recommend against it. I guess my opinion on this is just not interesting.

This one felt a lot like a business self-help book, which it is, but also felt like it had a lot of truth to it. Like a true business self-help book though, it contains a lot of "look at this CEO, using our ideas and being successful"-type of paragraphs. I'm never convinced about how true those testimonials can be. You can't just break it down to a few managing techniques and that's it, now your company is successful.

The writing was rather good in most parts, can't deny that. The comparison of sentences describing nonessentialists and essentialists was a bit on the nose, they always rubbed me the wrong way. I get the idea, you don't have to dumb it down even more. Other than that, it's just the idea of minimalism + don't spread out too much, broken down a bit too granular. It's the thoughts that automatically come to mind, when you think about sticking to the essentials, but much longer and in a book. Essentially, essentialism not essentially described.

I don't know if I would recommend this book, it was good, but know what you are getting yourself into.

I started reading this, because I already heard about it being as interesting for adults as it is for children. Now I think this book is much more written for adults anyway and I wonder how children interpret the story.

I don't think I even have to sell it much, it's not that long and it goes through the topic of being thoughtful with how you are using your time in life, but in a different way than you might expect.

Would recommend, it's a short but surprisingly deep book.