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A review by ladytiara
Goddess in the Machine by Lora Beth Johnson
4.0
Andromeda was put into stasis to leave Earth and travel to a new colony, and she was supposed to awake 100 years later on her new planet. But when she wakes up, 1000 years have passed, society has devolved, and everyone thinks she's a goddess.
Andromeda is a great character. She's a normal teenage girl who wakes up and finds she's a goddess, something she's completely unprepared for. She's forced to make an uneasy alliance with Zhade, an exiled prince. He's maddeningly attractive, but also rather shady, and Andromeda has to figure out how much she can trust him, while she's working her own angle in the alliance.
For me, the most interesting part of this book was the examination of how a culture can change over 1000 years. Although they technically speak the same language, a lot has changed and the slang is almost unrecognizable to Andromeda at first, but she's a word nerd and she quickly figures things out. (It's a little weird for the reader at first too, but most of the language is easy to figure out in context and you get used to it pretty quickly.) The book also looks at how a culture might handle technology they don't understand. This society has inherited technology, but they didn't invent it and they don't know how it works, so they view it as magic and they invent a religion to explain things.
This book is really inventive, and the author does a lot of interesting things with standard sci fi and fantasy tropes. I'm looking forward to the sequel.
I received a digital ARC from the publisher through NetGalley.
Andromeda is a great character. She's a normal teenage girl who wakes up and finds she's a goddess, something she's completely unprepared for. She's forced to make an uneasy alliance with Zhade, an exiled prince. He's maddeningly attractive, but also rather shady, and Andromeda has to figure out how much she can trust him, while she's working her own angle in the alliance.
For me, the most interesting part of this book was the examination of how a culture can change over 1000 years. Although they technically speak the same language, a lot has changed and the slang is almost unrecognizable to Andromeda at first, but she's a word nerd and she quickly figures things out. (It's a little weird for the reader at first too, but most of the language is easy to figure out in context and you get used to it pretty quickly.) The book also looks at how a culture might handle technology they don't understand. This society has inherited technology, but they didn't invent it and they don't know how it works, so they view it as magic and they invent a religion to explain things.
This book is really inventive, and the author does a lot of interesting things with standard sci fi and fantasy tropes. I'm looking forward to the sequel.
I received a digital ARC from the publisher through NetGalley.