Review:
I read this way back in May 2023, so my memories are fuzzy. Thankfully, I was still taking notes on my reading back then, so that can help flesh out my memory a bit.
Jazz is a small-time smuggler/delivery girl on Artemis, humanity's first and only lunar colony. She's barely scraping by and needs to get a large amount of money soon for reasons I can't recall, so she agrees to pull off a job sabotaging an aluminum company's harvesters for a rich client. However, things go wrong, people end up dead, and suddenly the fate of Artemis depends on Jazz somehow completing her original sabotage plan.
This wasn't bad, but it also wasn't great. Weir is a lot better at writing "smart white dude alone in space" books than he is at writing from the perspective of an Arab woman in her twenties. Also, he's better at setting up believable hard sci-fi than he is at setting up believable fictional social systems. Artemis was low on regulations and laws, and somehow had no murder (and also no age of consent laws or real legal system, so who really knows about the murder).
Jazz was a bit much, and probably the least meticulous of all of Weir's protagonists. The humor didn't work for me either - the "reusable condom" just made me cringe every time it came up, didn't serve a purpose beyond giving Svoboda a reason to ask about Jazz's sex life, and could easily have been dropped from the story altogether.
Everything was wrapped up too neatly. Definitely not Weir's best work.
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