Review: Aurora Rising

Aurora Rising by Jay Kristoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff have once again put their heads together on what's promising to be a pretty epic new YA sci-fi trilogy. Like with The Illuminae Files, it's got a few aspects to it that make it pretty experimental in its epicness - not so much in terms of playing around with the rules of prose and layout, but more in how much K&K shuffle around between no less than seven distinct POVs throughout the story. My personal favorite, though, being Finian just because of how unrelentingly bi he is. (Tbh I headcanon most of the main cast as some level of bi, because before the official cover of this book came along, the logo was written in bi colors if I remember correctly.)


While it's a bit of a long and jam-packed story, and a lot of it feels like a bit of Prolonged Prologue, I do feel that K&K have really stepped up their game compared to The Illuminae Files on a lot of levels. A much more diverse cast, for one thing - not only in terms of human races, but with each of the two main alien races getting one POV character each as well. The sense of scale and exploration out beyond our old world, even if that travel distance is compressed by the (admittedly super-dangerous) Fold. And the general vibe being that this book starts out like if John Scalzi had written The Collapsing Empire for a YA crowd, but then morphs into an actually watchable Alien: Covenant by the end.

And that's all I can say without spoilers.

I hope Book 2 doesn't take as long as the gap between Gemina and Obsidio did, though given that Kaufman and Kristoff are some of YA's most in-demand writers these days, I wouldn't be surprised...

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