Review: Earthshine

Earthshine by Graham Bower
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I almost gave up on this at 25%, because the copy editing needs a lot of work, and it looked like it was going to be otherwise mediocre. I gave it a second chance, though, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd thought it might be; it successfully avoided the white-saviour and magical-native tropes, at least, and told a decent story that had some original elements with some reasonably engaging characters. Several of the characters didn't get much development, though, notably the protagonist's flatmate and the Scandinavian tech millionaire. The latter looked like he was going to be important, but in the end mostly acted as a facilitator of the plot for the other characters. The minor antagonist Instagram influencer couple were amusingly well drawn.

Cosmic/spiritual books can often come off pretentious and hokey, but this one keeps the mysticism to a plot-relevant level.

I normally don't talk in detail about the copy editing in books I get for review via Netgalley, since if they're pre-publication there's often another round of editing yet to come. This one, though, is already published, so I'll mention the fact that it contains a lot of dialog that is mispunctuated in pretty much every way it's possible to mispunctuate dialog, and seldom uses the vocative comma (the required comma before or after a term of address, such as a name), which to me is one of the marks that separates professional writers from amateurs. It also makes most of the other common mistakes, but not as often.

It's otherwise OK. It didn't make me want to read a sequel. It's a pretty solid three stars.

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