Available on Kindle Unlimited Aug 2021

DNF @ about 10%

What to say?... I didn't enjoy the narrator who seemed to be talking to me, the reader. She "sounded" uneducated and didn't speak in a normal story telling style. I kept back reading trying to understand what she was going on about. There were such disjointed sentences and paragraphs. They even threw in a whole unrelated chapter. Something about a grieving mother becoming one with the earth. It was absolutely unrelated to the bastard kitchen servant, who was just telling me about her life in the compound. Unless it was completely related and just outside my reading comprehension.

I won't further try to explain my problem with the story except to add that I watched an hours worth of random you tube videos instead of re-picking up this story so I'm going to let it go. I kinda hate myself for wasting my time on those videos :/ ( )

Wasn't quite the "great story ever told", but it wasn't bad reading either--I'm a tough critic and it takes an awesome book that I'd refer to the world to get a 5, 4 is something I would definitely recommend and possibly read again, 3 is my typical nothing special but worth the time reading, and 2 is something I wouldn't read again. For some reason this plot didn't really draw me in --maybe b/c I expected it to be better..
There is nothing particularly wrong or bad about it--I rather spend my time reading something more interesting ( )

This is the fourth novella in the series – for some reason I skipped the third, not that they’re at all related in terms of story. And I think it’s set on Mars, like the other three, but it’s hard to be sure as there are no references to the Martian landscape. It’s not even as if the story needs to be set on Mars – The Martian Simulacra is a mash-up with Wells’s novel, so Mars is a given; and even The Martian Job (see here) required the Red Planet as its setting for its story, and almost certainly for its ending. The narrator of The Greatest Story Ever Told is a scullery maid in a household that trains “dance-fighters”. The society consists of masters, free people and hands. The hands are basically slaves. And they rebel. Led by the two most famous dance-fighters. After several months of freedom, by which time they’ve gathered several thousand to them, the masters send an army. You can guess the rest. Interspersed with the main narrative are short fables, framed as told by the narrator to other characters in the main narrative. Some of them have obvious morals, others I couldn’t see what point they were trying to make. Everyone in the story uses female pronouns. Of the three novellas from the quartet I’ve read so far, this was the least satisfying. The setting didn’t feel like Mars, I don’t think slavery belongs in science fiction stories, and the narrator’s voice was a little irritating. The stories-within-a-story, while hardly new, gave the novella a little more depth, but I suspect it was over-used a little. Not my favourite of the four, so far. And I still have one more to read. ( )