Illuminae ~ Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

I feel like this may be controversial to some as I have seen many reviews about how much people have loved this book/the whole series. For me, it was just a bit meh. I have come away not feeling any connection to the characters and have little desire to finish the rest of ‘The Illuminae Series’. This book has been collecting on my desk for a good couple of years and only decided to finally read it because this month’s theme is Space. Originally, I purchased this book because of its interesting format. The whole book is basically a case file, a collation of Wiki-like pages, interactions online and surveillance reports. I was somewhat intrigued. To put it simply Sci-Fi really isn’t my genre. However, I am trying my best to read outside of my comfort zone this year. But, honestly, I really struggled to get into this book hence why I didn’t finish it til over halfway through March.

Illuminae is set in 2575 in the midst of an intergalactic war. Main characters Kady and Ezra have recently split up and are now on separate spacecraft, with an enemy ship in hot pursuit, trying to communicate in secret online. However, this is the least of their worries as a deadly plague is mutating at the speed of light with terrifying results and one of the ships AI’s has turned against them. In a bid to save her true love, Kady, has to use her hacking skills to get to the truth.

For what felt like the majority of the book I really had no idea what was going on and struggled massively to get past the 100-page mark. I will admit that although I didn’t care much for the storyline and it’s characters once you got into it it did become much easier to read. I read the last 350 pages in one sitting. I think the main thing that I disliked about this book was that I was no way invested in the characters and what happened to them. I wasn’t even really bothered about the main character’s, Kady and Ezra, either. In my opinion, there were far too many secondary characters with military titles that were very easy to forget. Meaning when certain characters died I had no emotion towards these events whatsoever because due to the way it is written in a dossier-like style you lack the emotion and development of some of the characters. There is no time to become attached.

The storyline itself wasn’t gripping in the slightest and by the end, I was just finishing it for the sake of finishing it. As for the other two books in this trilogy, I can’t say I will be rushing to purchase them and after some investigating, I don’t actually think they are about the same characters anyway. Honestly, I don’t think I could read another book like this full of new and annoying characters. 

All in all, I was thoroughly disappointed by this book especially after being initially intrigued by the writing style it just fell rather flat. Therefore, Illuminaeby Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff received my first ⭐️⭐️ star rating of the year.

M🌸