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takarakei's review against another edition
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
I came to this series having read Fonda Lee’s other series The Green Bone Saga (which I highly recommend!!!).
I tell myself I’m not a big sci-fi person, but I also haven’t read a ton of it, and what I have read I haven’t loved (with a couple exceptions). This falls into that category. Fonda is really good at world building, but if I didn’t know it was written by the same author as GBS I never would’ve guessed. GBS is on a whole other LEVEL!!! I wasn’t blown away by this and it didn’t capture my full attention really. Idk if I would read the sequel, I’m like mildly curious what happens but I also feel like I could *probably* guess how it ends. There’s a bit of a romance subplot but it felt very YA insta-love-y.
There’s little details that don’t make sense for such a futuristic sci-fi novel - like idk if they said exactly what year it would be hypothetically, but this was published in 2017 and I think they said there had been 100 years of peace with the aliens so like….. why do they have plastic bottles and garbage bags? In all that time with advanced alien technology things like that haven’t changed? This was surprising to me because Lee’s other series the attention to these minor details is superbly done. It’s surprising that she wrote this series in tandem almost with GBS.
I tell myself I’m not a big sci-fi person, but I also haven’t read a ton of it, and what I have read I haven’t loved (with a couple exceptions). This falls into that category. Fonda is really good at world building, but if I didn’t know it was written by the same author as GBS I never would’ve guessed. GBS is on a whole other LEVEL!!! I wasn’t blown away by this and it didn’t capture my full attention really. Idk if I would read the sequel, I’m like mildly curious what happens but I also feel like I could *probably* guess how it ends. There’s a bit of a romance subplot but it felt very YA insta-love-y.
There’s little details that don’t make sense for such a futuristic sci-fi novel - like idk if they said exactly what year it would be hypothetically, but this was published in 2017 and I think they said there had been 100 years of peace with the aliens so like….. why do they have plastic bottles and garbage bags? In all that time with advanced alien technology things like that haven’t changed? This was surprising to me because Lee’s other series the attention to these minor details is superbly done. It’s surprising that she wrote this series in tandem almost with GBS.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Violence, and Abandonment
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Grief, Body shaming, Medical trauma, War, and Colonisation
Minor: Drug use, Body horror, and Child death
Animal cruelty/testing is referenced without graphic detail butdandelionsteph's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
3.25
I believe it was on Page 149 that I nearly gave up on this book due to its purple prose-y, bodice-ripper-like description of Donavan making out with Anya. They kissed before, and I thought it was unsettling, unoriginal and unnecessary, but I didn't think it would get worse. Thankfully, it doesn't get worse after Page 149. If this level of disconcertingly physical romance/aged-down sexual elements was properly warned for in the book's blurb, I think I would have avoided reading this book. I can only hope the sequel doesn't make the same mistake. I was so disappointed than Anya had to be a love/lust interest. The most important female characters to the plot and page space are Donovan's mother and Anya, and with the way one of Donovon's fellow soldiers-in-erze makes sexually-suggestive drawings, I get the impression that this book would very well have described Donovan's mother in narration or in character opinion in a sexualized way if she wasn't, well, Donovan's mother.
The sexual elements and profanity in this work are so egregious and unjustifiable that whenever they occur, I feel like sighing with disappointment. It actually tones down the mature feel of this work by making it feel like a libidinous 14-year-old boy is playing dress-up at what being "mature" is like. Brandon Mull's Beyonders was dark, complex and mature, and it didn't need to use sexual elements or profanity (or at the very least not with the same range and frequency as this book).
The sexual elements and profanity in this work are so egregious and unjustifiable that whenever they occur, I feel like sighing with disappointment. It actually tones down the mature feel of this work by making it feel like a libidinous 14-year-old boy is playing dress-up at what being "mature" is like. Brandon Mull's Beyonders was dark, complex and mature, and it didn't need to use sexual elements or profanity (or at the very least not with the same range and frequency as this book).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Violence, Murder, and War
Moderate: Xenophobia, Sexual content, Colonisation, Abandonment, Body shaming, Confinement, and Medical content
Minor: Animal cruelty, Medical trauma, Child death, Racial slurs, Drug use, and Sexual harassment
The "xenophobia" and "racial slurs" are in sci-fi equivalents, through the zhree being called "shrooms" by humans resisting them, and the humans enhanced with zhree biotechnologies being called "zebrahands" and dehumanized by Max's propaganda. The child death is only a few sentences' worth of a mention, from the kid of a secondary character who died long before this story begins, due to a lethal exocel integration failure. The animal cruelty consists of the exocel experiments on the monkeys in Dr. Nakada's lab, although, other than being grotesque to look at, they don't seem to be suffering. The medical trauma was included for thoroughness's sake, because it takes a while for exocel integration to take, and in the meantime it is painful and horrible. The actual process of receiving the treatment is done under anesthesia in a sci-fi process. The drug use is use of cigarettes by one character. Colonization, medical content, and body shaming are all in sci-fi contexts not necessarily equivalent to real-life ones.
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