Faith and Fiction Roundtable

This is one of those rare weekend posts that is occurring because Amy invited me to be a part of her Faith and Fiction Roundtable discussion.

The idea behind this concept is that a group of people read a book and then discuss it. We're each posting portions of the conversation we had our on own sites.

The book of choice was Offworld.

I'll have a full review of this book to post on Monday, but for now, if you'd like, you can read some bits of conversation over the book. Here goes:

Amy: Did you have a favorite character?

Ronnica: I enjoyed the characters (though they could have been a little more three-dimensional).

Jonathan: Characters were in limited supply, obviously, but I still didn't come away from the book attached to any of them. They were a bit 2 dimensional, once I met each one, I knew what to expect.

Mark: I certainly would have to agree with Jon about the characters. They felt very much like stalk characters, and I wasn't too surprised with how they behaved over the course of the series. Maybe one twist took me by surprise, but that was all. However, I did find myself moved by the "wrap up" chapter at the end that show our heroes moving off into their new life. So at some point they did get to me enough that I cared about them.

Amy: Considering I read the book a week ago, and I can't remember the characters names, I'd have to agree I didn't form any strong attachment to them.

Jennifer: I wanted to know what happened to Chris on Mars. His blackouts were very random. I do admit, I had a hard time remembering the difference between Owen and Chris and I thought Trisha was a strong female character.

Jonathan: The other thing that I realized that makes some parts seem unbelievable was that the group of amin characters was perfectly suited for whatever they came up against. The part of adventurers was already equipped to deal with everything. "We need to competently defeat a group of armed soldiers, too bad we're all astronauts. but wait, I'm special ops pretending to be an astronaut, so we're all good." "Trish has Fibromyalgia, and a killer migraine, and she's passed out, but it is ok, Mae's mom was a nurse, so we've got someone who knows exactly what to do."

I did enjoy the banter between the characters, and the way they bonded by the end, even after Owen, or was it Chris... went nuts and shot up the town (I enjoyed that part and sympathized with him) but it did seem that there was a fairly rigid, and therefore predictable way for the book to go.

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To follow the rest of the discussion, visit these folks:

Ignorant Historian
Random Ramblings from Sunny Southern CA
Behind the eyes, oversimplified
Mrs. Q Book Addict
My Friend Amy