Zoë’s Tale Review

Title: Zoë’s Tale
Author: John Scalzi
Date Purchased: 2/12/2017
Price Paid: $3.17
Date Finished: 3/4/2021
Rating: 3/5

The idea of telling a story twice from two different points of view is one that’s been stuck in my brain for a long time. As a teenager I worked at a record store and one of my coworkers was constantly jotting down ideas in a book. One night I asked him what he was working on, and his answer intrigued me.

He was working on a book that was essentially a retelling of the Bible, but from Satan’s point of view. The premise was that the Bible was nothing more than a propaganda campaign against Satan, and he finally wanted to tell his side of the story and set the record straight.

Paul eventually left that job and I lost touch with him, but that idea stuck with me. I have no clue how much progress he made – maybe he’s still working on it! But I thought the concept was really interesting, and that it could be a good read.

Zoë’s Tale, by John Scalzi, tells the same story as The Last Colony, but through the eyes of Zoë instead of John Perry. While this isn’t a case of retelling a story from an opposing point of view, it does work to fill in some of the gaps from the previous book.

But did we need this book? I’ll give the worst possible answer for a question like this: perhaps.

Why am I being wishy-washy about this? Well, let’s start with the reasons I think this book served a purpose other than fulfilling part of a contract.

In The Last Colony there are a few spots that appear to have been “hand waved” with some important events happening off screen. We finally get explanations for those events in this book which is good, especially as one of them is pivotal towards the end of the story.

Then there’s the matter of Zoë herself, and her relationship to an entire species of alien. While The Last Colony goes into a bit of detail about this, it’s clear that there is so much more than was covered. Zoë’s Tale gets into this in much more depth, and allows her character to experience some growth that was sorely needed.

So while those are all checks in the positive column, I still don’t know if we needed this to be its own book. We could have gotten four or five more chapters in the previous book covering the important parts and been fine. Not that this book was three-quarters fluff, but I feel like knowing the bulk of the story already made some of it feel extraneous.

I can see that it would have been a jarring narration shift as the entirety of the The Last Colony was told from John Perry’s point of view. Tossing a few Zoë chapters in there would have broken that flow. Maybe that would have cemented those chapters as being more important? Who knows.

At the end of the day, the book was good enough. I think if you’re borrowing the series, or don’t have to worry about time and money? Sure. Go for it. I’m just not sure it’s a must read for the sake of the series.

Final Thoughts: Good book, but probably not necessary in the context of the series.