Weir (The Martian) returns to the hard sf arena in which he has proved such a success. Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara-voiced convincingly by actress Rosario Dawson-is a porter and small-time smuggler. It is through her eyes and first-person narration that the reader is introduced to Artemis, a near-future lunar city. Jazz, morally skewed, is determined to find a big score and pay off a massive debt denominated, interestingly enough, in Slugs, a lunar trade medium used to calculate the cost of lifting mass from earth. She is offered a million Slugs by an Artemis resident, billionaire Trond Landvik, to commit sabotage. She finds herself in the midst of a battle with a Brazilian crime syndicate and must depend on friends including her Arabian father, a Ukrainian electronics whiz, and a Kenyan administrator, all voiced dramatically by Dawson. VERDICT Recommended for fans of hard sf, Weir devotees, and those who enjoy a strong female protagonist. ["Narrated by a kick-ass leading lady, this thriller has it all-a smart plot, laugh-out-loud moments, and really cool science": LJ 9/15/17 starred review of the Crown hc.]-David Faucheux, Lafayette, LA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

ARTEMIS By Andy Weir. Read by Rosario Dawson. (Audible Studios.) Dawson's nuanced voice takes us to the moon in the second novel by the author of "The Martian." UNCOMMON TYPE By Tom Hanks. Read by the author. (Penguin Random House Audio.) The Oscar-winning actor brings to life his debut collection of 17 loosely linked short stories. THE PURLOINING OF PRINCE OLEOMARGARINE By Mark Twain, with Philip Stead and Erin Stead. Read by Keegan-Michael Key, Philip Stead et al. (Listening Library.) The comedian and producer (and one half of the dynamic Key and Peele) narrates a previously unfinished and unpublished manuscript by Mark Twain, newly completed by the husband-and-wife children's book team behind the Caldecott Medal-winning "A Sick Day for Amos McGee." THE BOOK OF DUST By Philip Pullman. Read by Michael Sheen. (Listening Library.) The Welsh actor transports us into the fantastical parallel universe of Pullman's latest Y.A. trilogy, in which everyone has an inner daemon. PROMISE ME, DAD By Joe Biden. Read by the author. (Audible Studios.) The former vice president delivers his candid, heartfelt and inspiring memoir of losing his son Beau to cancer while facing political challenges foreign and domestic. & Noteworthy "O.K., I'm a nerd. I loved THE ODYSSEY from my first encounter in ninth-grade English class (the Robert Fitzgerald translation). The great questions of survival, cunning, treachery, exploitation and parental and marital love have never failed to transfix me, in whatever translation (Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles). But Emily Wilson's, the first into English by a woman, is a revelation. Never have I been so aware at once of the beauty of the poetry, the physicality of Homer's world and the moral ambiguity of those who inhabit it. Don't miss reading her enlightening translator's note, which explains how seriously she took up the challenge posed a few lines into the first book: 'tell the old story for our modern times./Find the beginning.' She wrestled with contemporary questions of feminism and colonialism without imposing them on the values of Homeric Greece. Her decisions to discard flowery conventions, and to limit herself to the number of the lines in the original poem, produce a version both fleet and vivid. Read for all this, but mostly to savor lines like these: 'he plunged into the sea and swooped between/the waves, just like a seagull catching fish,/wetting its whirring wings in tireless brine.'" -SUSAN CHIRA, SENIOR EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT FOR GENDER, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.