Synopsis: The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the Academy would touch…
A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm
A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates
A smart-ass techwiz with the galaxy’s biggest chip on his shoulder
An alien warrior with anger management issues
A tomboy pilot who’s totally not into him, in case you were wondering
And Ty’s squad isn’t even his biggest problem—that’d be Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, the girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline-cases and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.
Review: Aurora Rising is the highly anticipated sci-fi book written by the dynamic duo of Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. I’ll be real honest and say I didn’t care for any of these characters, which isn’t something you want when a book has a rather large cast. I’m definitely going to give this a re-read because it’s part of a series, and maybe my feelings will change, but I wasn’t really in for any of the characters at all. Part of that might be because I had a hard time distinguishing between them even though the POV shifted with each chapter. I hoped that, if I read enough from a certain character’s perspective, then I would be able to keep them separate a litte. That wasn’t the case, and this made a lot of the chapters feel disorienting. The one perspective that kind of stood out was Auri’s because she was so confused for the entire book. She also kept using Lord of the Rings references, which is fine, but it seemed like that was the only form of entertainment she liked back in her day. So that was odd.
The story itself was okay. I like how fun it is to read Amie and Jay’s sci-fi books because I need to read more sci-fi. The one gripe I have about the writing is that there were a lot of parallel scenes that felt more distracting than entertaining. I don’t know if this was an Amie thing, or a Jay thing, but I know Jay has done that with Nevernight where two scenes will be right after each other and they seem to blend together or mirror each other. In Aurora Rising, this was done with one scene ending on a phrase, and the next scene opening with that same phrase. I hope that makes sense. I usually like this kind of writing, but it just happened a lot more in the beginning than I wanted.
Entertaining story, but the characters did nothing for me.
3 howls
Comments