Reviews with content warning for Blood - Axiom's End

First contact! Conspiracies, government agents, conspiracy theories, warring alien factions - this book has them all in spades. And yet, the story almost seems languid for much of it. This was not a drawback for me. I liked the slow burn for much of the novel, with the reveals coming slowly. The main focus was on how completely disparate life forms and societies would interact. Where would we understand each other, and where would we be horrified. Quite nicely done.

The narrator was mostly quite good, but overdid it a few times.

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bean_7088's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious tense slow-paced

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

4.75

Wow...
Like wow.
First, the narrator was incredible. It's always a hit or miss with many for audio books but Stephanie Willis was amazing.

I've known about Axiom for a whole since I do follow Lindsay Ellis, but I've always felt very indifferent to YouTuber authors, no matter how much I like their content. But since I've been reading again I thought I'd give it a go. Really I only read this because there were no holds on it 🤣
I was surprised by how tense it was, I loved the twists. Did I roll my eyes at some of the alien relationship? Yes. Did I still love it? Also yes.
It's currently almost 5am here, and I couldn't stop listening.

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beccaand's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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hanz's review

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adventurous mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

The beginning of this book is so slow and the pacing is a little all over the place. I think it shouldn't have least 100 pages shorter. Haven't read many first contact stories, but I found that I didn't really care about the characters or what was happening.

The books also had some weird info dumping parts where a character would repeat something that happened in the previous couple of chapters in very stilted dialogue. This didn't happen that often, but it was enough that I noticed it.

Otherwise it's very readable and picks up in the second half, but not enough for me to continue with the series.

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