zombiezami 's review for:

The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer
3.75
adventurous dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
While the increased worldbuilding was interesting to read about, I felt like this book didn't really need to exist. The first book was so well crafted, and I think part of the success was that you were mainly dealing with two characters throughout the whole book, and only getting a POV from one of them. Brightness, on the other hand felt pretty gummed up by the additional characters and jumping back and forth in time so much. I also didn't think it was necessary to come up with such such neat and tidy explanations for events that happened in the first book. I think it would've been fine to leave some of that stuff ambiguous. To that end, it's pretty silly that
Devon Mujaba sabotaged the zygotes using testosterone to make any that survived infancy be hyperaggressive after puberty. It's a myth that testosterone makes people more aggressive. I know this isn't common knowledge, but I learned this recently, and that knowledge made it difficult to take some of the events that took place seriously. Like, it's totally believable that parents and repressive governments would sacrifice teens and disregard their bodily autonomy because that's what they do in real life. But this second book just has too many moving parts that it makes it difficult to suspend my disbelief
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