Book review – Aurora Rising (Spoiler Free)

“But they have not seen their sun die. Their people burn. Their world end. And they do not know, yet, that there are some breaks that cannot be fixed.”

• Title: Aurora Rising
• Author: Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff
• Genre: Science fiction
• Pages: 473 pages
• Publication date: May 6, 2019
• Publisher: Knopf Books

I haven’t read a good science fiction book like this in a long time, and I missed it. Aurora Rising, though it had a lot of characters, had many great memorable characters and an interesting plot that kept the whole book strong.

Tyler Jones, a star student, wants to get the squad of his dreams. But he couldn’t sleep the night before his big day. When he goes out to fly a spaceship one last time before he graduates, he finds a girl stuck in a coma state, about to head straight for her death. Him rescuing her cause him to be stuck with a squad of creatures that no one wanted to have. (And I say creatures because not everyone on the squad is human.)

But things start to get weird when they find out the girl he had saved had been asleep for over two centuries. And there are major consequences for being asleep for over two centuries.

The story itself was compelling. It did have a small side love plot in like three different directions that I wasn’t fond of, but the author kept it light and out of the main plot, which I preferred.

The whole squad is six people—meaning six POVs—and there’s some other somewhat major characters from that. Everyone’s background is important, so it’s something to keep up with. That could be a bit turn off for some readers. At the beginning, it did take a little while for me to grasp onto who all the characters are. They slowly introduced them all, but they also all have weird names. Some of them, like Scar, has multiple names they goes by, which could get tricky.

But overall, I enjoyed reading this book, and hopefully the second book in the series will be just as good. It’s not a super quick read, but the story reads at a good pace. I would recommend this one by far!

Score: 9.2/10
Average rating on Goodreads: 4.33/5