I loved this so much as a teen, and my strongest memories of reading it then are Amy. Rereading as an adult was interesting. Parts of the story held up to my memories and others were a bit like entering a weird time capsule. It was extra odd to go from reading Karen as hopelessly grown-up to a kid in their first career, and honestly it's kind of fun to reread just for the new lens my personal changed experiences.

Congo is an interesting Micheal Crichton novel, though it has a very slow start from the prologue to them arriving in Zaire. Not just slow, but, boring slow. It's very much an infodump about the technology and history. There's far too much emphasis on the history of exploration of the area of Africa where they are, and it's hard to tell what's real from historical accounts and what was made up by Crichton for the plot.