****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
As my subject reads, Half Way Home is the first Hugh Howey novel I've read. Prior to seeing this title in Kindle Daily Deals, I'd never heard of him. I'm glad to know about him now!I have a lot of thoughts about this book; most of them quite positive. First, from what I understand, this is a self-published book, and I'm extremely pleased to say that was not at all obvious! I've read (wasted money on) too many self-published books that were awful with grammar, syntax, and spelling errors, in addition to just being stinkers all around.I do, however, feel compelled to point out one error that I found quite jarring. At location 989, this line: "We need to get out of here," Kelvin said, looking back and forth between Tarsi and I.PLEASE GOD, can people stop confusing proper use of "I" and "me"! The last bit of line should be "Tarsi and *me*", not "Tarsi and *I*". This is a huge pet peeve of mine, admittedly, but it has become a distressingly common error, to the point where I'm almost more surprised when it's NOT made than when it is. Seriously, my formal education did not go beyond high school (and trade school later, but no language classes), and I know better than this! How/why did this error become so common? Authors, reporters, lots of well-educated folks who should really know better do this, and it makes me crazy. I know. First-world problem. Okay. /rant Aside from that one small (but really annoying!) thing, I have no complaints about the grammar.As for the story, I very much enjoyed it! Took me a little bit to come to terms with the fact that it's more social commentary than a great world-building sci-fi saga. That was confusing, initially, because it was obvious pretty quickly that the novel was too short, and progressing too slowly for him to have time to get into the ecology of the planet and how the colonists would adapt to living there. For awhile, I thought surely this must be the beginning of a longer series, until I realized what it's really about. Social commentary is not my favorite thing in a novel, but once I realized that's what this is, I was fully engrossed in the sci-fi setting in which the tale is delivered. Definitely sci-fi "lite", but still fun.Upshot is that I'm definitely a Hugh Howey fan now. From reviews of his other books, I gather I can expect more social commentary, but I don't see that as a negative, in his case. His writing is solid and compelling, and his stories seem to be mostly set in post-apocalyptic and/or other-worldly sci-fi settings, which are among my favorites!My main complaint is that his books all look to be quite short. I just bought the omnibuses for Wool and Shift, both of which are only just big enough to be considered full length novels, rather than collections of several novels in one.
