Review: The Last Hour of Gann

The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

I read this for the Alien square for Halloween Bingo



She should have been prepared to see something like this. An alien, that was. From the moment she'd first seen the scaly deer if not sooner. But there was a big difference between knowing intellectually that there were forms of animal life on this world and seeing a six-foot tall lizardman come at you out of the bushes with a knife in his hand.

This was 1,000 pgs. I'm exhausted because as you can tell by rating, it was only an ok 1,000pgs.
Look, everyone seems to love this book, so grain of salt and all that but here's my probably not coherent exhausted luke warm take:

The first three books(parts) was pretty interesting, meeting our first person pov heroine Amber and how she has had a poopy life on Earth and decided the best way to survive was jumping on a space ship. Her whole life seems to be taking care of her sister Nicci who is completely a waste of space. Nicci depends solely on Amber and blames her if anything goes wrong. The ship gets hit by a bunch of asteroids, killing most of the 500,000 or so, gets knocked off course and crash lands on an unknown Alien planet.
48 survive with a guy named Scott who wants to be leader and really has it out for Amber.
I've never been in such a survival situation with a group of people but I would hope food and shelter would be first on their mind, at least for a hot minute, over what guy gets what "womb" out of the 11 to repopulate their colony. Looking over reviews, I see this is classified by some as erotica, which could help explain the huge focus on sex, which felt over focused on to me.
People needing leaders but too scared to lead I get, but the hate on Amber felt so forced and the lack of anyone questioning stuff, again, felt forced to serve a narrative. It was a good narrative on society with a Lord of the Flies feel but still, a bit forced.

Meoraq and his world that Amber crash landed on was interesting, especially with the importance of religion the author added in and how it tied into their society and cultural values. Meoraq's faith and sureness in his world and role in it was interesting to follow along with as he met Amber and how she slowly but surely put it dent in it all.

After book three, things slowed way down for me as it was endless Amber fighting against the group trying to get them to survive, her sister treating her like crap, and Meoraq being annoyed with the whining humans but also kind of attracted to Amber, a lot of rinse and repeat. Book six has Amber being kidnapped and the constant rape scenes start, it was incredibly exhausting.

I liked how the author addressed religion, how its needed, what it provides, and how it can lie. I liked how this was something pretty different with the alien world and culture and how Meoraq was a lizard, no human characteristics at all. I also liked how the humans were the "aliens" and how the author played with that theme. Ultimately, this was too long with repeated scenes, forced or simplistic actions, and too many rape scenes. If you want something different with a lizard hero, many others really enjoyed this.

View all my reviews