Genre: Sci-Fi Age Range: YA Star Rating: 4 stars Series: yes - final book in trilogy
*SPOILER ALERT: contains SPOILERS for ILLUMINAE and GEMINA*
Synopsis:
Kady, Ezra, Hanna, and Nik narrowly escaped with their lives from the attacks on Heimdall station and now find themselves crammed with 2,000 refugees on the container ship, Mao. With the jump station destroyed and their resources scarce, the only option is to return to Kerenza–but who knows what they’ll find seven months after the invasion?
Meanwhile, Kady’s cousin, Asha, survived the initial BeiTech assault and has joined Kerenza’s ragtag underground resistance. When Rhys–an old flame from Asha’s past–reappears on Kerenza, the two find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict.
With time running out, a final battle will be waged on land and in space, heroes will fall, and hearts will be broken.
Synopsis taken from Goodreads. Add to your shelves here.
Review:
This is a good conclusion to a series, and audiobook is certainly working as my way forwards to read it. It manages to balance a massive cast of existing characters and add in new leads, so it’s a pretty packed story. The full cast makes it much easier to tell the speech apart when it’s a radio channel or chat log.
There was a lot of “transcribed videos” and observations from AIDAN, which helped describe what was happening, particularly as this was a book stuffed to the gunnels with action and story lines. It was good to see where people were in relation to one another as rebellions, mutinies, and battles raged.
There were also several “quiet” moments, to build relationships and the such. They didn’t advance the story, but were a nice break from the chaos happening and gave characters a chance to bond or process the horrors they’d been through.
The ending was a little piecemeal – there were about five different sets of action making up the finale. It didn’t rapidly cut between the story lines, so at least it could be followed and the action was clear. I didn’t muddle up who was where doing what.
However, it also meant that I couldn’t really remember the exact details of the dun dun duh that each story line finished on, and so it was a little hard to get back into a story line. Plus it felt like the story line was being forgotten as it took so long to get back to it.
There is one more “twist” about the same emotional punch as the other two books, so of course I didn’t believe it again – and was right. It was also undercut by the knowledge of who the analyst was who was describing scenes (which was a cool reveal, to be honest. I liked how they wove that in).
Overall, this was an enjoyable series end, and certainly a series that slowly grew on me once I switched format.
Read my reviews of other books by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff:
Co-Written:
The Illuminae Files (this series):
The Aurora Cycle:
- AURORA RISING (#1)
- AURORA BURNING (#2)
By Jay Kristoff:
The Nevernight Chronicles:
- NEVERNIGHT (#1)
- GODSGRAVE (#2)
- DARKDAWN (#3)
By Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner:
The Other Side of the Sky:
Sifa Elizabeth Reads 