#47 Illuminae

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

1

This isn't my usual go to genre or book generally, its the sort of thing i would have picked up and enjoyed in my early 20's but ive heard so much about this trilogy? so i thought why not! The cover art is very pretty which made it a very easy decision to buy a physical copy as lately ive been trying to read more kindle versions of books to save space



Right, so this story is a sort of sci-fi apocalyptic romance YA mash. At the very beginning of the story the protagonists Kady and Ezra a teen couple who have just split up are attacked by a war ship run by the corporation Bei tech and they must escape together to safety.

The unique thing about this book is that its told in a series of instant message logs, emails, memos, announcements etc. I enjoyed this style and layout as it broke up the story really well especially as the book is just short of 600 pages. If this was written in the usual YA novel  style i probably wouldn't have got through it as its a tiny bit generic.

There was a few twists and some enjoyable villains, most notably Aidan who is the computer artificial intelligence system. Aidans monologues were very well written and i enjoyed the dry humour of it. Kady and Ezra were a bit meh as characters and Kady was portrayed as your typical pink haired heroine that is pretty bad ass which is fairly standard in YA these days (and which i actually dont mind, girl power) whereas Ezra is a love sick puppy who would do anything for Kady (zzzZZZ) he had little to no substance at all and was generally quite difficult to like or even care about. There wasnt very many other notable characters really... So if you didnt like Kady or Ezra you were pretty screwed.


All in all it wasnt bad. A fairly average sci-fi YA book, they only thing that saved it for me was the layout which i found to be fairly unique. Im not sure if i would read the second or third book. Possibly but id probably have to nap them from the library as im not interested enough to splash any cash for them.