Category Archives: science fiction

books, Reviews, science fiction, Soft Science Fiction, Space opera

The Fractured Void (Twilight Imperium #1) by Tim Pratt

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Stars: 3.5 out of 5

I admit that this was a fun and lighthearted romp of a novel.

As far as first books in a series go, it fulfilled its function rather well – it introduced the world and the characters that live in it without it ever filling like an infodump.

The world is fascinating. We have different planets, and a lot of different alien species that have learned to co-exist in a way that seems very natural. The way they operate, talk and interact with each other never feels forced. Also, all alien species described fit well into their environment, like the “squid” people who live on two planets that are covered by oceans.

This is what attracted me the most to this book. I love when the author knows their world. He doesn’t have to give us an infodump on it for the reader to see that. The little hints thrown here and there along the story show the reader that there is much more history to explore and that the author knows what’s going on. There is background there. Things happen for a reason. I would love to explore this galaxy a bit more in the next books.

But the worldbuilding is only part of the magic formula. The other ingredient is the characters. And I admit that this part didn’t work quite as well for me.

I liked the Duval Devils alright, even though they seemed a little over the top in their piratey brashness from time to time. They seemed like a group of misfits at first, posturing in front of each other and trying to look cool. But I admit that they gelled as a team somewhere halfway through the book, probably because they finally had a common goal and a common detestable person to hate. I think Tib was my favorite character in this book. She is smart, she is efficient, and her sarcasm is right up my alley.

I really didn’t click with the duo that was opposing them. I know Azad and Severine were supposed to represent two strong female characters, but… I don’t know… I think Azad’s complete lack of scruples or any moral compass at all did her no favor. She has all the markings of a psychopath, and I have never been particularly found of those. The author kept them alive for a reason, so my guess is they will play a part in future books, but honestly, I could care less.

The author takes home the 2020 award for creating the most detestable character of the year, and he isn’t even a villain in a true sense of the term. Thales is a despicable, nasty piece of work. He is a megalomaniac with a huge chip on his shoulder who never forgets any offense, real or perceived, towards his fragile ego. I admit that I cheered a little when our good captain punched him in the face. And I definitely felt good when he got what he deserved at the end of the novel.

My problem with this book is that it feels like a big prologue rather than a first book in a series. The set up for the real conflict happens in the last two chapters and in the epilogue. Yes, it was fun to see the Duval Devils wheezing around the known galaxy assembling parts for the wormhole device, but it’s only set up. The bad guys are introduced only in the last chapters, so the end of the book feels rather anticlimactic. Yes, Thales got what he deserved, but the damage is already done, and the REAL STORY starts now. Only it doesn’t because the book ends.

I like this book well enough to pick up the next one in the series, because the writing was fun and light and there was a good balance between action and exposition. Hopefully, I will like the characters of the next installment better than this one.

PS: I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Post-Apocalyptic, Reviews, science fiction

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

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Stars: 5 out of 5

This is by far one of the best books I’ve read in 2020, and I have read over 90 books so far this year.

Here is the premise: multiverse travel is possible thanks to the technology discovered by a brilliant inventor on what is called Earth Zero. Unfortunately, in order to traverse the space between worlds and survive the integration into the new reality, the traveler needs to be dead on the other side. So basically, you can only travel to worlds in which the local version of you is already dead, otherwise it would be like trying to push yourself into a space that is already occupied. The results are… bloody and definitely fatal to the traversee.

So even though scientists are biting at the bit to go and explore different versions of reality, most of them come from wealthy backgrounds, which means they are alive in almost all those realities. So people from disadvantaged backgrounds make the best traversees. People who live in poverty and hunger, in war thorn villages, and places ravaged by disease.

Cara, our protagonist, is one of those people. She is dead in all but a handful of the 300 or so worlds that can be visited from Earth 0. She is worth something to the company she works for precisely because she is so worthless to the rest of reality that it’s a miracle she survived at all.

I loved Cara as a characters. She is deeply flawed and has a huge chip on her shoulder. She is convinced that she is worthless, that she is scum, that doesn’t deserve love, affection, or even happiness. Part of it is because of her upbringing, part of it is because she studied how all of the other versions of herself died, part of it is because she has a secret she is ashamed of.

This perception of unworthiness taints Cara’s view of everything in the world as well as her relationships with people she loves. And it’s infuriating and painful to watch sometimes. She immediately assumes the worse in any situation and acts on that assumption, often creating conflict where there wasn’t any or hurting people who didn’t mean any harm to her.

A lot of times I just wanted to shake her and tell her to just stop assuming and actually TALK to people. Especially when it comes to her relationship with Dell. She loves Dell, but she had decided that Dell doesn’t reciprocate the feeling, that she is either indifferent or flat out hates her instead. And she decided that without even talking to Dell about it. Really? A lot of hurt feelings and misunderstandings could have been averted if those two had sat down and talked things through at least once.

It was very interesting and satisfying to see Cara grow as a person. She starts the book as someone only looking out for herself. Someone who is trying so hard to fit in with the citizens of the City that she is shunting everything that remind her of her roots. It’s very fulfilling to see her realize that those roots make her who she is now. That she is worthy of love and admiration as a person she is, not just as a commodity that can hop between worlds.

I like that by embracing those roots she realizes that there is only so much that her moral compass would let her do, and when she stumbles into a dangerous plot and has a choice to make between going along and living in comfort and being ashamed of herself for it, or going with her conscience and trying to stop the people responsible, and probably die in the process, she chooses the later.

There are a lot of important themes in this book. What is the value of human life? What length would you go to to pursue your dream? Can people change, and more importantly, can your perception of people change based on their actions?

And the most important message of all, I think – you can find happiness if you accept yourself fully, flaws and all.

2020 has been a difficult year for all of us, and I found that message of hope was extremely timely and uplifting.

PS: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Reviews, science fiction

Stars Uncharted by S. K. Dunstall

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Stars: 5 out of 5

I loved the Linesman trilogy by this author, so there is not surprise that I absolutely loved this new book as well. It’s different than Linesman, darker, more ruthless, but excellent in its own way.

I love the way the authors paint the world they create by small touches interspersed in the narrative. No big info dumps needed. The reader gets just enough information to understand what’s happening. and when we get more information than that, it’s woven into the plot organically. Nika lives and breathes modding, so it’s natural that she will be thinking and talking about that. Josune has been an explorer all her life, running after an elusive dream that borders on obsession, so she will know everything she can about Goberlings discovery and disappearance…

I also loved the characters. They are all unique and vivid. Nika and her mod obsession, Josune who isn’t afraid to make hard decision on the spot, Roystan who would do anything for the crew who became his family, even whiny little Snow showed some surprising depths. And Jacques, oh Jacques… please come cook for me every day! From all of them, Carlos was the least fleshed out, but mostly because he didn’t have as much to do.

As I said, this world is ruthless, and an individual is often powerless when big corporations own everything on a planet, including the police, hospitals and news outlets. So our protagonists go through some horrible ordeals and are forced to do some terrible things. I am glad that even through the bleakness, this story never looses its heart. After all, it’s first and foremost the story of lonely individuals thrown together by circumstances who manage to form a dysfunctional, but close knitted family.

I hope this book doesn’t stay a stand alone because I would love to see what our crew does next. And Josune’s promise to destroy Eaglehawk needs to be kept.

books, Reviews, science fiction

steel frame by andrew skinner

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Stars: 5 out of 5

There are books that you anticipate and count days until release… and end up disappointed sometimes. Then there are books that you pick up at a whim, just because you were browsing NetGalley offers and nothing else seemed more appealing… only to be blown away by the story and the characters. 

This is one of those books. I requested it because I was in a lull and a story about giant robots sounded more appealing than anything else I saw at the time. I ended up staying up all night to finish it. Then I bought a copy as soon as it released and made my husband read it. He loved it.

Steel Frame is a unique story that borrows some interesting concepts (Giant piloted robots that might or might not be self-aware!) and manages to tell a compelling narrative with them. It’s a story of loosing everything and slowly crawling back from the abyss, assembling yourself back piece by piece until you almost feel whole again. Interestingly enough, this process happens both to our protagonists and the villain of the story as well. I loved that parallel.

It’s also a story about prisons and prisoners. Rook, our protagonist, is a convict who agreed to sell 10 years of her life to a corporation in exchange for a reduced sentence. Heck, most of the people operating the huge starship Rook ends up on are prisoners, even if some of them don’t realize it – they are shanghaied beyond the edge of the explored space, far away from any commercial routes, on a ship that will never be able to escape the strange anomaly it came to study.  Even the antagonist’s main motive is to break free from the prison that held it for millennia. 

But this concept is not all doom and gloom. This story is also about finding friends and a place where you belong and about making a conscious choice to defend that new place even if that means risking your life. 

Oh, and giant robots! I grew up on Neon Genesis Evangelion and giant robots that work in sync with their pilots (or jockeys how they are called in the book) are right up my alley. I loved how they are depicted in this book. I love that the author defined the rules by which they work (rules of physics, but also rules of law, rules of custom, and so on). I love that all jockeys, no matter what faction they originally belonged to, adhere to a few cardinal rules. And that when one of them is broken, it causes real, almost physical shock to all of them. Because to break a rule like that, you really need to be a monster.

A could wax poetic about this book for a few more pages, but I don’t want to give any of the story away, and I want readers to experience this new and complex world for themselves. I want them to experience Rook’s first encounter with the Juno, as well as their first sync. I want them to see for themselves the high stakes battle for survival in the alien prison. I want them to hear the giant ship groaning as it tears itself apart. 

Buy this book. Read it. Ask for a sequel. Because it needs one!

PS. I received and advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Reviews, science fiction

Recursion by blake crouch

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Stars: 4 out of 5.

I requested this book from NetGalley on a whim. The blurb was interesting and I had enjoyed the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy, but I didn’t have many expectations. It could have gone either way for me. Boy, am I glad that I got to read this!

It’s hard to review this book without giving away too much of the plot, so I will avoid talking about the story itself. Let’s just say that Blake Crouch raises interesting questions about how humans perceive time and space and that our memories define who we are. He also suggests that if our memories of past events become unreliable, humans will most likely unravel. 

If you have memories of two distinctly different lives suddenly pushed into your head, what do you do? Both feel real. You can remember seeing your daughter die in a hit and run when she was 16, but you ALSO remember going to her college graduation. In fact, she is sitting next to you right now. Worse still, SHE remembers dying as well… but she is still alive. What is real? What isn’t? What if you suddenly have 4 or 5 different lives in you head? All yours. All real. No wonder there are mass suicides all over the globe.

This story is told through the eyes of two protagonists: Helena, a neuro-scientist obsessed with creating a memory reactivation device that would save her mother from the slow deterioration of Alzheimer’s disease, and Barry, a NY detective who witnesses a woman jump off a high rise after she claims she a case of FMS or false memory syndrome. At first, it seems that those stories aren’t connected, but they meet and interweave together nicely. 

I loved both protagonists. Barry is believable as a man who has nothing left to live for, so he clings to the mystery of the jumper with FMS and continues investigating it even when everyone rules it out as simple suicide. Then, when he gets a chance to rewrite his past, but has to face the consequences of that act, I fully understood why he wanted to destroy the people who put him through that heartache again.

Helena is even more tragic. All she wanted to do was help her mother keep at least some of the memories that were being eaten away by the horrible disease. Instead, she precipitated the destruction of human civilization. And she has to live with it… over and over again.

I also liked the way Blake Crouch portrayed the time paradox and the effect altering timelines would have on people. I don’t think I have seen this particular take on time travel before. It was original and it made sense, in a horrible kind of way.

So why did I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 if I liked it so much? It mostly has to do with the ending. More precisely, the theory that changing one event would undo the whole string of time paradoxes. I won’t go into any details on that, because this book shouldn’t be spoiled, but I will just say that that sounded like an easy way out to me. 

In any case, I highly recommend this book for fans of time-travel, sci-fi and “what if” stories. It’s fast paced and smartly written, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

PS. I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

books, Post-Apocalyptic, Reviews, science fiction

Dahlia black by keith thomas

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Stars: 2 out of 5.

What attracted me to this book is its comparison with World War Z (the book, not the awful movie). I loved WWZ and its (then) new take on the zombie apocalypse. I loved that the author chose to tell the story of what happened AFTER the end of the world as we know it. That it was as much a tale of fighting the zombies as one of rebuilding a life in a new reality where they existed. So another story about civilization coping with a world-changing event and rebuilding after it – I was all in. 

Unfortunately, the only way this book IS like WWZ is that it’s a collection of fictional interviews and diary entries. It is also very, unimaginatively boring… I kept hoping that there would be some emotional reward or grand revelation if only I kept reading, but I turned the last page and the only thought in my head was, “why waste 288 pages on THAT?”

The whole story can be summed up in four steps. 1. There is a mysterious Pulse from space that alters human DNA. 2. About 30% of people are susceptible to the Pulse and change, becoming the Elevated. From those, about 1/3 die during the “transformation. 3. The surviving Elevated disappear from our reality into a parallel dimension during the Finality. 4. The other 70% of the world’s population learn to keep on living.  That’s it! Why drag this into 288 pages of boring accounts? Why rehash the discovery of the Pulse for 100 some pages? 

I guess the biggest problem with this book is that the author chose the wrong people to be his “voices” telling this story. His fictional book writer interviews scientists, members of the White House, the President, and other fellow journalists. None of them were the boots on the ground when all these events happened. They observed and reacted from afar. What made WWZ so great was that we read the accounts from people who survived those zombie attacks. So it felt like we were right there with them when the horror was unfolding. Here, we have several degrees of separation between the events and the people who tell about those events. So guess what? I don’t feel engaged. It’s a snooze fest instead.

Plus, all the major events the Pulse and the Elevation triggered are just summarized by the author. Give me the eyewitness accounts of the massacre of the Elevated Camp, don’t TELL me in a half-page summary that it happened. I don’t want to read 10 different interviews with Dahlia Black about her accidental discovery of the Pulse. I got the gist of it the first time around, thank you very much! You want to keep me engaged? Give me more eye witness accounts of the transformations. Give me survivor reactions. Don’t tell me that the world collapsed and is slowly rebuilding itself. SHOW me. Unfortunately, the author failed to do just that.

I also didn’t quite understand the need to insert this whole side story about the Twelve. It brought nothing to the main storyline and felt absolutely useless. 

To summarize, WWZ this is NOT. And definitely don’t compare it to the brilliant weirdness of the Southern Reach trilogy. This is just plain boring.

PS. I received an advanced copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

books, Post-Apocalyptic, Reviews

The Grand Dark by richard kadrey

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Stars: 2 out of 5 (and that’s pushing it because at least the language is good)

I love the Sandman Slim series, so I really, REALLY, wanted to love this book… I was so excited to receive the ARC from Netgalley that I pushed all my other half-read books aside to start this as soon as possible. Unfortunately, my excitement soon turned into bewilderment, then annoyance, then boredom. I finished it only because I was already 75% done and felt like I’d already suffered enough torture to stick around and see the ending… which was nothing to call home about.

So what went wrong with this book? Oh where do I begin? Get comfortable, it’s gonna take a while.

First and biggest problem, in my opinion, is the pacing. NOTHING, and I mean, nothing happens in the first 3/4 of the book. The protagonist delivers some packages, then goes home to get high on drugs and have sex with his girlfriend. Rinse, repeat. for over 300 pages!!!

Then the action suddenly picks up around page 300 and we careen to the end at a neck breaking speed. It would be good if the pacing was justified, but it feels exhausting, almost as if the author suddenly realized that he only had 400 odd pages to tell the story and decided to cram all of it in the last 100 instead of editing the beginning and cutting most of the boring bits out. The action feels more like an outline that has been hastily fleshed out just enough to pass mustard. And the big reveal, final big bad, as well as the ending are underwhelming to say the least.

I might have been okay with the lack of story in the beginning if the protagonist was interesting enough to follow along with. But Largo is anything but. He is a doormat. He has no initiative. All his life he simply floats with the current thinking only about his next score or his girlfriend. He doesn’t DRIVE the story, he just floats along in the current. So when it’s not even clear where that current is going, this gets boring very fast.

And even when he actually decides to do something, he doesn’t actually have to work to accomplish anything. There are no real efforts on his part.

He needs to make an urgent delivery and his tires are slashed? Hey, perfect time for character growth and for the author to actually make him DO something to change his circumstance… But no, another courtier, who was never mentioned as being his friend, lends him her bike. Why? Because reasons only known to the author. Mostly, I suspect to move the story along.

He decides to go to Higher Proszawa, which is a battlefield and a quarantine zone off limits for everyone. Does he plan this trip? Does he, you know, gather supplies, investigate the means of getting there an back? Actually do something to get this done? Nope… He just mentions this to his friend Raineer and magically, everything is taken care off. He suddenly has money, and a weapon, and a convenient way in and out via a smuggler his friend knows. Everything handed to him on a sliver platter.

I could go on and on about this, but that would just be beating a dead horse. This character is as interesting as a doorknob. And he is the protagonist, which can tell you a lot about the other characters in this book. They are all cardboard cutouts that have a role to play to push the doormat Largo along. The girlfriend who has zero personality apart from being beautiful and in love with Largo. And her sole purpose in the story is to get captured to push the protagonist into action (or what passes for action for this one). The best friend and wounded veteran that conveniently still has all his contacts and can part with a wad of cash even though he lives in a dilapidated apartment on a meager government pension. And so on, and so forth.

And finally, the worldbuilding really sucks. We are told there was a great war that Lower Proszawa won, but we don’t know when that happened, and who they were fighting against. The other party is only ever mentioned as the Enemy. We also know absolutely nothing about the world outside of this city. I think one other “provincial” town is mentioned once, because a character was born there. Other than that, the rest of the world might as well not exist at all.

In fact, at one point, I even wondered if Lower Proszawa was actually a purgatory for all the souls that died in the war. That would have explained the lack of information about the outside world or why the details of the Great War are so fuzzy, or why they live in constant fear of a new war… Now that’s a twist I would have welcomed. Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be.

What we have instead is a sub-par story with a boring protagonist in a barely fleshed out world. Very disappointing book from the author of Sandman Slim series. I definitely won’t recommend it. Save your money and your time for other books.

books, murder mystery, Post-Apocalyptic, Reviews

The last policeman by ben h. winters (the Last policeman book 1)

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Stars: 5 out of 5

Wow, that’s the most different pre-apocalypse book I ever read.

What do you do when the end of the world is coming in just 6 months and there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it? A huge meteor is on collision course with the Earth and it will hit, it’s a 100% probability, the only uncertainty is where the point of impact will be. But even that doesn’t really matter, because what isn’t destroyed during impact, will slowly die in the nuclear winter that will follow as the catastrophe puts enough debris in the atmosphere to obscure the sun for decades. So 6 months to expiration date for the human race.

How do you cope? Some people walk out on their jobs and go through their bucket list. Some people find fate and religion, or join a cult. Some commit suicide (there is a lot of those). Officer Palace is dead set on solving a murder. Despite the fact that nobody seems to give a damn about it anymore, despite the slowly crumbling infrastructure, and even faster crumbling social structures. He will solve that murder because this is what keeps him sane while the days count down to the final big impact.

I loved the main character in this story, how obstinate he was in solving this murder, despite anything and everything. How desperately he clings to police procedures, rules and regulations. Because that’s what helps him cope with the end of the world.

I also loved the other characters we encounters, each one representing a different way of coping with the inevitability of death. Some drink, some do drugs, some just give up and wait to die, and some cling to any sliver of hope they can find, even the maddest one.

I also liked that despite certain violence in this book, the world didn’t dissolve into bloody chaos. People are still mostly decent to each other. Things are still getting done. Some people still come to work, mostly because what else would they do? Sit at home and wait to die?

It’s that air of melancholy that surprised me the most about this book. Yes, Henry solves his murder case in the end, but does that really matter? Does any of it matter when the Earth will die in 6 months? And the sad part is – he knows that it doesn’t matter to anyone but him either.

books, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic, Reviews

The Rising Dead by Devan Saglian

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Stars: 2 out of 5

I like to indulge in a good old zombie book from time to time, and I was fresh out of zombies (no pun intended), so I decided to give this book a try. After all, it had a lot of glowing review on both Amazon and Goodreads… I don’t know why.

Seriously, the story is cookie cutter zombie outbreak: evil corporation plays with viruses, but something goes wrong and the strain escapes. Cue brain eating zombies everywhere. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind a predictable story in the zombie-verse. After all, there are only so many ways to make a brain eating undead.

The story can be predictable as long as the characters living (or dying) in these events are interesting, fleshed out and likeable (or hateable) enough for me to want to see who meets their gruesome end and who survives despite all odds. Unfortunately, this book has nothing of the sort. All characters are cardboard cutouts with about as much personality. You can just put labels on them and be done with it: the shy geek, the college baseball jock, the slutty partying girl, the meek girl who gets eaten first, the grizzled paranoid war veteran, etc. They are all essentially faceless and characterless, and I didn’t feel any connections to any of them. Oh, someone else got eaten by zombies? Good for them!

And to add insult to injury, the story is riddled with inconsistencies and plot holes. For example, the patient zero gets infected by just spilling some of the virus and inhaling it because he didn’t have his mask on. So then the pathogen is airborne, right?.. Nope. After that first time, ALL other victims are infected through direct contact only – you get bitten, you turn. So why would the virus suddenly change its MO? Why mention it in the first place? It makes no sense. Patient Zero could have been bitten by a test animal, had a fresh papercut and a hole in his gloves, etc. Possibilities are endless…

The final nail on the coffin for me was the lack of editing. And I’m not talking about spelling and grammar here. I can deal with that if the story is worth it. I’m talking about the constant “head hopping” in the middle of scenes. We would listen to the POV of one character, then suddenly hop into the head of another for 2-3 lines, then go back to the first character. It happened so many times it gave me whiplash. You can write a book with different points of views, but be consistent throughout your scenes!

So to summarize, I finished the book, because it was a slow day and I was particularly bored. But I will not give my money to read the sequel. If I want good fast zombies, excellent action scenes, and characters I can actually care about and be sad when they get bitten, I’ll rewatch Train to Bussan.

books, Post-Apocalyptic, Reviews, science fiction

Apocalypse Nyx by Kameron Hurley

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Stars: 3 out of 5.

This is a  tough review to write. See, I loved the world Kameron Hurley created,  but I deeply disliked our protagonist. Yet Nyx is the product of that word. So that awesome world building that I found so fascinating produced a protagonist so unlikable, that I actually wished the bad guys killed her before the end of the book.

The planet Nyx lives on isn’t Earth, but it was colonized by people from Earth, who brought with them their religion, their problems, and their conflicts.  This is a harsh and unforgiving world: the radiation from its suns produces all kinds of cancers in populations too poor to live behind protective barriers reserved to the elite. Most of the planet is a desert and resources are hard to come by, so nations are in a perpetual war against each other.

It’s a war without rules or boundaries, where radioactive and chemical weapons are used so often, most border towns are contaminated beyond repair, and locals don’t even take cover during daily air strikes.

Nyx lives in a nation that has been at war with its neighbor long before she was born and will still be waging that war long after she dies. Everyone is conscripted into the army when they reach adulthood, but the amount of time men and women serve is different. Women go in for two years and assume most of the command posts. Men go in for 30 years and are considered cannon fodder. Most never come back from that war, or come back broken beyond repair.

Nyx experience unnameable horrors in that war and even perpetrated some of them. She was so badly injured that she had to be “remade”, which means that over 80% of her body isn’t hers anymore. Worse than that, she has been mentally damaged as well. She has severe PTSD and survivor’s guilt. She has vivid nightmares and flashbacks to her times on the front line and she can be unpredictable in those moments. Well, no, I take that back, you can pretty much guarantee that she would lash out with extreme violence.

She chose to think only about her own survival and not get attached to anyone or anything. She is harsh and abrasive, downright violent at times with both her enemies and her partners, and she wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice them all to save her own skin.

I understand why Nyx is the way she is. At the beginning of the book, I even empathized. After all she’s been through, it would have been surprising if she wasn’t messed up in her head.  My problem is that Nyx doesn’t change. This book consists of three novellas presented in chronological order, and Nyx stays the same unlikable abrasive self through all of them. There is no character growth, no redemption arc, not even a hint that she might mellow or start giving a shit about her companions.

I can stick with an unlikable protagonist as long as there is some hope for character growth. I might not like them, but I can stay invested if I saw an effort to better themselves and overcome their past. Unfortunately, there is no such hope for Nyx.

My other problem with Nyx is that she never faces her problems head on. She never stops to discus them with her companions and try to work out a solution like most adults would do. She chooses to lash out and run instead, then drown her frustration in alcohol until she passes out. Every single time. After the second or third time Nyx bailed and got drunk instead of just talking through the problem, I lost the little respect I had left for her… as well as my investment in her story.

So nice world building, Mrs. Hurley, but I won’t be sticking around for the next book unless Nyx starts growing.

PS. I received an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.