A review by fantasynonsense
Nyxia by Scott Reintgen

4.0

“It’s just one day, I remind myself. My fight is one of decades and generations. One bad day won’t stop me from rising up. I won’t quit, not today, not ever.”

➣ Overall Story

3.75/5, rounding up. Upon intially finishing this book, I gave it 3, maybe 3.5 stars. But I kept coming back to it, and the world created in this story, and finding that the more I think about it the more I enjoy it. I was thrown by the "high-octane" buzzwords thrown around, because I found the first third feeling very slow and stagnant. Not that it wasn't interesting, but it felt like a heavy chunk of character definition, so we could get it out of the way in one part and move on to only action. Because the action and the character interaction once they were on the ship was really interesting.
It is definitely a quieter type of sci-fi that brings to mind the original Star Trek more than Firefly or Battlestar.
A brief overview of the kids:
Emmett - trying is best and we're all rooting for him.
Kaya - honestly such a great girl?? Deserved better.
Bilal - the Goodest Boy™ Honestly one of my favorie male characters in YA lit.
Katsu - he's always on your team, and we're glad.
Longwei - because everyone needs the unbeatable, emotionally-closed off rival.
Jaime - I forgot about Jaime for a while oops.
Azima - a good, strong girl. I want good things for her.
Jasmine - nice but bland.
Roathy - I honestly don't care about this kid.
Isadora - Not a fan. I'm hoping to get a better sense of her motivation in the next book.

➣ The Good

The characters were definitely the highlight of this story. I really loved Emmett, Kaya, and Bilal and looked forward to any scenes they had together. It was so easy to get invested in these kids and the challenge set before them. There were scenes with these kids that definitely made me tear up and even though some fates feel set in stone by the end of the book, I'm still holding out hope.
The mystery surrounding Babel is the other driving force behind my continuing the series. The ruthless way they pit the characters against each other in their challenges, the way they keep them in the dark make them feel so sinister in a way you can't even hate yet, because there's so much Emmett hasn't discovered.

➣ The Bad

As per usual, my main gripe is that with a cast this large and diverse, it would have been nice to see more LGBTQ representation. While romance is definitely not the main focus of this story, it's something I always search for in little comments and actions characters make. There are still two more books and who knows what could happen, so this isn't even a strong complaint for me.

➣ The Unclassifiable

The (other)world building. While we know that the kids are being kept in the dark about much of the planet where they're going to mine nyxia, I had a hard time keeping a clear visual of the planet in my mind. Same with Earth itself. While we know it's in the future, and the story doesn't take place there, it'd be nice to have a "recent history" summary of what has been happening and why, even in the future, technology is still far enough behind that Nyxia is a completely novel material. Nyxia itself feels a little bit like a deus ex machina and I would've liked to have known more about how it works, and why it works that way. We know it's exhausting to use, but why didn't we see more experimenting with the different uses of the nyxia rings in their free time. Why can it be used as a weapon, a tool, and a translator? Just having Babel say, "we don't know how it works yet," felt like a bit of a cop-out.

➣ Final Thoughts

Scifi is a deceptively difficult genre to get right in stories, just because a lot of modern scifi focuses so heavily on visuals to help tell the story, but this was definitely a contender. What it really needed was another 100 pages to flesh everything out, and a little bit more time spent worldbuilding. Half of the cast was very memorable and half faded into the background, but somehow the book still felt strong and had emotional weight. However frustrating the mystery surrounding Babel was, it was still compelling enough that I can't wait to pick up the next book!