Aurora Rising Review

Hardcover, 473 Pages
YA/ Fantasy/ Sci-Fi
By: Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff
Rating: 🌟🌟

“Do moons choose the planets they orbit? Do planets choose their stars? Who am I to deny gravity, Aurora? When you shine brighter than an constellation in the sky?”

🌟 My most anticipated books have turned into my most my disappointing books this year! I don’t know if my high expectations ruined this for me or it was really not that good. But Amie and Jay gave us the Illuminae Files which I adore and so I expected a bit more from this. But even when I was objective and putting my expectations aside, I think this book had many writing problems.

🌟 Getting into this book felt like getting into home after a long day of work, familiar and comfortable! I immediately got into the story, and the writing style that they used at first (Ending with one sentence and starting the nest paragraph with it in a different time and place) was wonderful! I felt happy because maybe I was staring at the pages of a new favorite book.

🌟 Dreams came tumbling down only a few pages in when I was reading Tyler’s point of view, there was mention after mention of his killer dimples and hot looks. You would think that if he flashed those dimples at me I would give this book a rating of 5 stars (plot twist: I don’t). The brilliant writing style was not there anymore and it was getting more and more annoying.

🌟 Now more characters were introduced, 7 to be exact and each chapter was written by a character’s POV so yes, you got that right, there are 7 POVs that were confusing and I had to go multiple times to the start of a chapter to see who the hell was it talking. I like books with multiple POVs but not when all the characters are carbon copies of each other and they all talk in the same way. Here is a short summary of those 7 characters:

• Tyler: The golden boy, the all around captain. I did a which Aurora Rising character are you before reading the book and I got this and so was excited when I first started reading his POV but his dimples had the opposite effect on me.
• Scarlett: I like this character a little bit, not that she is a favorite but she can speak many languages and she got some sass.
• Cat: She is supposed to be the kind of girl who do not give a lot of fucks and is a brave heart.
• Auri: Our girl from planet earth who is trying to figure what the hell is going on (I was also trying to figure the same thing with this book so don’t you worry about a thing).
• Zila: The brain of the group, she does not talk too much and her POVs are usually a sentence or a page maximum which gave her a place as my favorite!
• Fin: He is supposed to be the comic relief, the sarcastic guy in the group whose naivety is a material for a laugh out loud.
• Kal: the tough unearthly guy that has a dark past and is not supposed to fit in.

🌟 Now that was my short summary and take another look and you will notice 2 things: That the characters were a group of cliches and that I wrote supposed to many times and you my friend are right if you already found out why I said that, the characters were all the same, I felt they were supposed to be something but they were not, they told us that but never showed it. The 7 characters were all sarcastic and that was too much for me. I even thought “Man, this is the future, they may be talking in a different sarcastic way for all I know!” except that Auri is from planet earth and has been sleeping for the last 200 years and she wakes up and talks in the same effing way!

“Just because you’re not saying it doesn’t mean you’re not thinking it.”

🌟 This review is not over yet, it is a long one because I owe you all an explanation and I owe it to two authors who wrote one of my favorite series so let’s continue this rant.

🌟 So the characters are all sarcastic, all have the same voice and it could not get any worse, right?

O, Daughters! you are wrong because it can. The synopsis and how this book was marketed gives us the illusion that those characters are supposed to be bad (they are at the bottom of the academy’s list) but they just excelled at what they do and I thought that maybe there won’t be group work and chemistry but I did not find that, they were like the top students of the academy, the justifications we were given for their not successful ranking felt like half baked bad excuses. I.Did.Not.Buy.It!

🌟 The world building was good because it was not limited, this is space and we can have whatever we want in the story, there are no limits! But I could imagine it easily and did not have problems with this aspect.

🌟 The pacing was quite fast and there was a lot going on and event after event after event which I usually like, what I don’t like is that there were those huge obstacles that the build up for makes you think they are impossible to overcome, except every time they overcame them in the same way, Auri’s eyes glow and by her mysterious superpowers that she can’t control she saves the day! Auri was the Deus Ex Machina in the story that was just one more writing problem…

🌟There was the focus on physical attributes which I did not like, this can be hurtful specially for younger readers! Speaking of which, the dimples were not mentioned a lot in the second half which as a whole was better -but do not raise your expectations-.

🌟 Summary: An over-hyped book that had a lot of tropes and stereotypical shallow characters that were all the same. The plot did not blow me away and the sarcastic writing did not work for this one! Do I plan to continue the series? I think it is obviously no after this rant, life is too short for this and as Mr.Jay once said: too many books, too few centuries!

“The thing I was raised to be is acutely aware of how easy it would be to reach out and break this human boy. But the man I try to be keeps his arms folded instead.”