Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

At first blush, Psalm for the Wild-Built is a cozy and relaxing piece of sci-fi…but if you paid ANYTHING close to list price, you were ripped off. Even the supposed bargain of almost half off for the preorder at an eye watering eleven bucks is in fact about $8 too expensive. I was done with the book in a scant hour and a half, which for what I paid is half the time I’d expect to invest in a book. I will concede I am a fast reader, and ebooks are very easy to flick through…but Psalm is a bare 100 pages in ebook form, somehow the paperback claims to be 160 pages (I assume through bigger font and meddling with line spacing). Either figure is not worth a penny over about $2.99. 100 pages is a novella, not a novel, and no novella is worth the $11 “bargain” I got it at, never mind nearly $20 the list price was. I then went back to the product page to see if I’d somehow missed something and this was in fact listed as a novella. It is not. Because TECHNICALLY the word/page count is high enough to pass it off with a wink as a “novel.” You may think I’m being mean and miserly with all this complaining of cost and relative value for time spent reading, but Becky Chambers hasn’t just ripped her readers off fiscally, but in the literary sense. The marketing and book synopsis make it sound like you are going to be spending a large chunk of time on the journey of finding out what humans want, by means of asking as many as possible. What you actually get is a eight chapter PROLOGUE, with the protagonist suggesting an itinerary for the ACTUAL advertised journey in the final two paragraphs of the story. We are then left dangling awaiting the continuation of the tale described in marketing blurbs and the jacket synopsis in a SECOND BOOK. Given that Psalm released just yesterday, I don’t anticipate seeing that sequel for a year or more. I regard it as shameful and audacious by both Becky Chambers and her publisher to pass off an overblown 100 page prologue as a full novel, more shameful still they advertise content not contained therein, and am forced to conclude either that the author ran out of creative juice, or more likely, she has cut a longer and more COMPLETE novel into pieces so that she has a series and can bilk the readers for $10-20 per chunk, in which case shame on her. It stings even more knowing she is more than capable of writing excellent FULL LENGTH novels, but has ripped her readers off like this with Psalm. I’m not bothering with any sequels, Monk and Robot is an obvious money grab by an author arrogantly riding the hype of her prior award winning series.