Reviews tagging 'Fire/Fire injury'

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

1 review

brnineworms's review against another edition

adventurous tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is YA. That’s not a positive or negative judgement, just an observation. It wasn’t marketed as YA fiction as far as I recall but that is absolutely how it reads – a college-age protagonist who needs to learn a lesson or two about responsibility, an intermittently-relevant family, awkward romance, drama, angst, queer rep, etc. I enjoyed it but I can see I’m not the target audience.

Also,

I feel like a lot more could have been done with the fact that Ampersand’s knowledge of Earth culture was hundreds of years out of date. He could have spoken Middle English, for example. The point was that he thought humans were violent and backwards, owing to the fervent religious fundamentalism and purges he witnessed in the wake of the Black Death. But then that seems kind of unnecessary, because we’d already seen him horrified by humans eating meat – there was no need to invoke medieval atrocities when there are already aspects of modern life which he finds abhorrent.

This may seem nitpicky but it’s superfluous details like this that end up making the book at least a hundred pages longer than it needed to be. Thankfully, the quick pace prevented the story from feeling like a slog.

I’d recommend Axiom’s End to fans of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host. It has a similar vibe.

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Genocide, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Medical content, Suicide, Confinement, Self harm, Stalking, and Violence

Moderate: Racism, Death, Antisemitism, Cursing, Drug use, Gore, Panic attacks/disorders, and Sexual content

Minor: Torture, Toxic relationship, Xenophobia, Ableism, Car accident, Colonisation, Grief, Gun violence, Islamophobia, Slavery, Vomit, Murder, War, Abandonment, Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child abuse, Excrement, and Fire/Fire injury

mind control, not having control over one's own body