I wholeheartedly admit that I am a sucker for anything described as “illustrious leader must unite a band of misfits to save the world/galaxy.” Probably a niche genre but yeah, I love stories like Firefly and Star Trek (2009) and Mass Effect. Ensemble pieces where not everyone works together perfectly at first but by the end you have a cohesive crew of crime-fighters/world-savers. And that’s what Aurora Rising promised to be. Since the second book in the series came out earlier this month, it seemed like a good time to pick it up.
Aurora Rising (2019)
Written By: Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Genre: YA Space Opera
Pages: 472 pages (Kindle)
Series: The Aurora Cycle Book 1
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
The premise:
The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the academy would touch . . .
A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm.
A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates.
A smart-ass tech whiz with the galaxy’s biggest chip on his shoulder.
An alien warrior with anger-management issues.
A tomboy pilot who’s totally not into him, in case you were wondering.
And Ty’s squad isn’t even his biggest problem — that’d be Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, the girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline cases, and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.
NOBODY PANIC.
Spoiler free.
Discussion: In the end I had some mixed feelings about this one. It is in no way perfect, with some fairly large problems that I think ended up turning a really good book into something sort of mediocre. But…I was highly entertained the entire time I was reading it. So make of that what you will.
I read the sample of every book before I buy, now. I’ve been burned too many times with novels that are all looks and no brains, so everything that goes on my want-to-read pile gets two or three chapters to convince me it’s worth it. Usually I can tell by the end of Amazon’s “look inside” feature whether I’ll like it or not.
Aurora Rising was an instabuy after the first page. I loved Tyler’s voice. Voice can totally sell me on a lackluster story, and it was definitely the characters that kept me going through this one. They were fun to be around, each with their own quirks and hang-ups. Their snark had me giggling the whole way through. Finian, the sarcastic engineer with a disability that looks a lot like polio, was probably my favorite for obvious reasons.
But here’s the flipside. With seven major characters, this definitely counts as an ensemble cast. And every single chapter hopped into another one of their heads. Imagine my consternation when that first brilliant chapter from Tyler turned into a chapter from the girl he rescued, Auri. And then her chapter morphed into Tyler’s sister, Scarlett. And so on and so forth. Yes, I gradually fell in love with each of them, but it set me back a little as a reader every single time I flipped the page and saw yet another point of view.
I did the math. With seven POV characters (which is more than a lot of epic fantasies I know) each character only got five chapters. That’s not a lot of time to get to know someone and how they’re feeling. The constant head-hopping got confusing, to the point where I couldn’t even tell whose head I was in anymore, and it forced us to skip some pretty important emotional milestones along the way. In the end, it felt a little manipulative, like a ploy to keep the reader from guessing things too soon. Which didn’t end up working, by the way. It only served to make certain plot points feel glossed over or flat out ignored until the appropriate moment.
Which leads to the second of my complaints. I was just not a fan of the “romances.” I use the term loosely because I’m not even sure I want to call them that. The two possible relationships felt like such an afterthought to me that they don’t really count. I’m sure this is another byproduct of the head-hopping. Without the time for any emotional build up for a single character, there was nothing to connect with. And since I’m already jumping up and down on this dead horse, I’ll leave it at that. “Surprise! They love each other!” is not a brilliant move.
Buuut… (I know there’s a lot of buts…) I can’t deny this was highly entertaining. And why else would I read except to be entertained? It was fast-paced with a great central mystery introduced in just the first couple chapters. Definitely reminded me of both Serenity and Mass Effect on several occasions. I did still really love the whole motley crew learning to work together and trust each other thing. I was extremely sad to say goodbye to them at the end of the book, and I can’t wait to see what they can take on now that they’re working together.
In Conclusion: I think this one would really appeal to older YA readers who are looking for fun, fast-paced science fiction that doesn’t mess around with a lot of murky emotional content. It’s fun, it’s snarky, and it looks like it’s going to be one hell of a ride. Spaceships and explosions galore and maybe we’ll get a deeper look at some of the characters along the way.
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