★★★☆☆ More a themed collection of stories than a novel

When the Moon Hits Your Eye

John Scalzi

I found myself disappointed by John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye. That's mainly because I was hoping for a novel and didn't quite get one. In his acknowledgments, Scalzi summarizes the structure of Moon

...a book about the moon turning to cheese, have each chapter represent a day in the lunar cycle, each chapter with mostly different characters in mostly different places in the Unites States, reacting to it in ways specific to them alone...

Now, Moon does in fact have a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and and end.

The problem is that, told as it is, in short day-in-the-life stories with mostly different characters each, it doesn't have the stakes that make a novel really interesting. We don't spend enough time with any of these characters to get to know and care about them. That at least, was how I felt.

Instead, it felt to me like a themed short story collection. Some of the stories were rather good. Scalzi can do pathos and humor. There were some stories that made me laugh out loud. I especially enjoyed one that was just a transcript of a Slack chat about an eclipse-watch party. But honestly, most of them were just not very interesting, because I barely know these people. Five or six good stories in a collection of 29 is not a great ratio.

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