Review: Infinity Son

Infinity Son by Adam Silvera
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hmm. Well, I can see why this book hasn't been doing as well on GR as I've come to expect every time Adam Silvera puts out something new. To be honest, a bit of it might stem from the world building not being the best - but then again, has Silvera ever been a particularly detailed world-builder? Look at how much he actively doesn't explain where the Death-Cast app gets its information in They Both Die, for instance. He's much more character-driven, always has been, for which I've always appreciated him because his characters are some of the best-rendered in the business. Hell, it was his parts of What If It's Us that made me not want to completely just forget that book existed.


As for Infinity Son, though...well, as Silvera's first piece of fantasy, and by far his most speculative novel of them all, it definitely plunges you into an alternate world with very little background info and expects you to try hard to keep up. Then again, underdone world-building hasn't necessarily stopped me from enjoying a book before - I think that was commonly cited as a flaw in L.L. McKinney's A Blade So Black, where world-building was somewhat left by the wayside but McKinney's gift for action and social commentary shone through on every page. And so the case is with Silvera and Infinity Son as well. In this world, blending elements of Harry Potter and X-Men in particular, there's been a hell of a lot of prejudice against those with magic, to the point where there's an up-and-coming conservative senator trying to wage a presidential bid on an anti-magic platform. Oh, how he's going to be a thorn in all our sides throughout this series...

Silvera gives us four POV characters in this book, though I'm not going to lie, I think he should've stuck with maybe two or three. The brothers Emil and Brighton, in particular, as well as Ness, who's pretty complex and helps make other characters more so. No spoilers, because Ness's true identity is perhaps the biggest one in this book. As for Maribelle...honestly, I hate to say it, but I found myself seriously skimming her chapters. She just didn't do it for me nearly as much as the others, and when one of them is an annoying fame-hound like Brighton, that's saying something. Not to say that it was a bad idea for Adam to experiment with writing from an unlikable POV - hell, he does a good job of making Brighton increasingly unlikable over time, which makes me sad because at first I related to him just as much as I do Emil.

Yes, this book has a lot that's been done before, in tons of different ways. Some of which are, of course, signature elements of Silvera's books in general - unapologetically gay Latino leads with family tragedy in their backstories, for instance. I only wish that Silvera could've gone for his usual immense emotional range, full of the highest highs and lowest lows...



Yeah, I really do have to include that GIF on every Adam Silvera review. The sad thing is, though, this book didn't wring the tears from me like any of his previous books did. Which is okay, but it also just felt a hell of a lot less gloriously geekboyish - I mean, remember all the references to Marvel and Scorpius Hawthorne and everyone in More Happy Than Not, or They Both Die? Maybe Silvera just decided that the entire book would be a reference to those geekish works and their styles, and that individual references just wouldn't do.

I dunno. I just have a lot of feelings about this book. But one of them was fun, for sure, and that's why I'm giving this book a much higher rating than most of my Goodreads mutuals have. It's hard to get me to dislike Silvera, ever, and even this book couldn't do the job.

Though you know who did? Brighton.

Jaroda, for one, was right. He can CHOKE.

(Especially on that cliffhanger.)

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