Aurora Rising by Jay Kristoff & Amie Kaufman | Book Review

【 AURORA RISING 】

book one in the Aurora Cycle series

This is a generous three star rating.

Genre: YA, Sci-FI
Author: Jay Kristoff & Amie Kaufman
Published: May 2019
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Pages: 496 (paperback)

Man I struggled with this book. This is a well-loved YA sci-fi but goodness I’m not sure it’s quite my thing. I do love sci-fi but I find it’s a fine line between good sci-fi in the YA field, and sci-fi that’s just a bit eh. Unfortunately, I think this was closer to the latter.

I made it to the end though, and after the halfway mark (with much encouragement from friends) I set aside my differences and just embraced the clichéd sass-pit that was this book. It is fun, that can’t be denied. But it’s troped-up to the eyeballs and I think there are about two personalities between all seven characters.

Speaking of characters, my god we get all seven perspectives on rotation. This hardly ever bothers me but I think because they were virtually all the same character copy and pasted with occasional differences, I was constantly flipping back to the beginning of the chapter to work out who was who. I’m not sure I really have a favourite character because of this blur between them.

The overall plot is definitely fun – I think the skeleton structure of the book is good and has so much potential. It reminded me a lot of Colleen Houck’s Terraforma (that, I can recommend heartily).

My current running theory on why I didn’t get along with the writing style was that I’m not sure Amie Kaufman is the author for me. I love Jay Kristoff’s stuff on its own, but with other books where Kaufman’s been in the mix, I’ve felt similarly meh. Who knows.

I think I need not go on for this; it’s Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman – they’re either your thing and you already own this, or they’re not.