THE RINGS OF MARS by Rachel Foucar

3.5 out of 5 stars

On Amazon UK
On Amazon.com
On Goodreads

How I discovered this book: it was submitted to Rosie's Book Review Team, of which I am a member.

In A Nutshell: Sabotage aboard a space ship

About a 500-strong crew on a year-long mission to Mars, to establish a society that will, it is hoped, be part of the solution for all the troubles on earth.  But there appears to be a saboteur on board ship...

I liked the premise very much, and Ms Foucar has a most readable, flowing writing style.  I was drawn in quickly; the beginning, with Jane Parker leaving a dying country, held great promise, and there is an excellent part early on in which a maintenance crew member gets killed.  Around a third of the way through, though, my interest began to lapse.  There are a lot of main and secondary characters, all with unmemorable names like Pat, Pamela, Jane, Mark, Frank, Beth, Sam, which wouldn't have mattered so much if the POV didn't change so often, and most of them didn't talk in the same way.  It was okay at first, and I had a clear picture of Jane, Mark and Pat, but after that it all got a bit hazy.  Having said that, most of the dialogue is basically good; natural, convincing.  

I wasn't sure how old they were all supposed to be, but they gave the impression of being in their early twenties, and sometimes seemed more like students running around a campus than people especially selected to go on this important voyage; I didn't get the feeling that they were on a ground-breaking mission into space.

For a scifi thriller, there was a lot of talking but not very much tension or drama.  I also felt that the plot itself wasn't very clear, as if there hadn't been enough thinking through, but, it didn't help that the mobi copy I was sent for review was badly formatted - on (literally) every other page there was a gap in the narrative thus:

ARC Not for Sale

*page number*

The Rings of Mars 

Rachel Foucar 

....filling a third of the page, sometimes breaking a sentence in two.  Obviously I would not mark down the book itself for this, and I tried not to notice and just read the story, but it became off-putting, and made me lose concentration.  Also, early on, there were a few punctuation errors - simple ones, like apostrophes in plurals.  

This is a first novel - the author definitely has talent, and this story is a great idea.  I would suggest a) working with a good editor to pull it into shape, b) instructing her publisher to make decent review copies before she sends out any more! and c) having a re-think about some of the character names - perhaps make some of them more unusual, and more 21st century.  To sum up - it's good, and has the potential to be very good, but it felt a bit 3rd-draft-ish, and needs more work to make it publication-ready, in my opinion.