A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

Book Title: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

Author: Hank Green

Series: The Carls #2

Date Started: May 31st 2021

Date Completed: June 14th 2021

Genres: Sci-Fi, Contemporary, Mystery, Thriller, Adventure

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

I really respect Hank Green and his endeavours, his interests, and the way he tells the world about them. A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is another example of that; it's good fun, just as thoughtful as the first one, though perhaps erring a little more on the side of sci-fi adventure than sci-fi mystery. Green has such interesting ideas, meticulously researched and planned and conceived. It is, for the most part, utterly convincing and thoughtful.

A big chunk at the start of the book establishes how things have changed since the end of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, and we also get an introduction to the various different perspectives in the book (was that a thing in the first book? I honestly can't remember). It isn't until around a third of the way through that we start to dig into the meat of this particular story - and then I started to get excited.

The end of the book became slightly out of control, and had it lost its credibility a little for me. There's generally a really good balance between science fiction and 'real life' cause and effect/commentary (I mean, I happily went along with a talking monkey that was once an AI sculpture without question), but the finale felt like it became too 'epic' for its own rules. It was so cool for the different narrative strands to collide, but it lent too much on omnipotent AIs, Sword Art Online-style VR obsession, and an internet personality being able to raise hundreds of billions of pounds in three hours.

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor was a really good sequel; it mixed it up story- and theme-wise but kept the characters and core beliefs in line with what we loved in the first book. Half the enjoyment came from seeing these characters grow and develop in their own right, which I suppose is kind of a moral of the book.