5 ⭐️ 2🌶
I finished up my ARC of The Stars We Found by ES Brandon last evening. It was very good. I liked it even more than the first. This book takes place about 7 years after the first one finishes. The ship has made it to Proxima Centauri b and all the occupants are building a colony. The environment is very harsh and there's crystalline creatures called razerbeaks that are trying to kill everyone. The book had a little bit of a Jurassic Park feel to it.
Spoilers ahead;
Maya is grieving the loss of Julian's neural interface projection. Cryosleep didn't erase or heal her experience, it just paused it. She starts to rebuild his sensor ghost line by line on her down time. She lives jacked into this neural interface and sets herself down a destructive path that doesn't affect just her. She rebuilds fake Julian, that she calls Echo in this book, by cyphoning power from the colony. Eventually the power stealing causes the colony perimeter to be compromised during a storm and one of the greenhouses is nearly destroyed compromizing a percentage of the newly gown food supply. Through her entire ordeal real Julian attempts to get through to her and waits patiently for her to pull her head out of her ass. There are some really heavy emotions in this one. Her neural interface use essentially is an addiction. Prolonged use of the interface has lasting physical damage that can lead to death. Several people check on her constantly and try to steer her away from destructive behavior. She keeps being a coward and knows what she's doing along the way. It was quite a compelling storyline. I won't go into it too much more because then I'd really spoil it.
My beefs with this book: In the first book I could have sworn Maya said both her parents were dead. In this book she talks about her mother still being on Earth. Real Julian had feelings for Maya. This book never says anything about how the neural interface must have taken his actual emotions or personality and manifested that in Maya's mind. It just launches in with real Julian pining after her immediately. Not a beef so much as just an observation, the sexual encounters in this book were much different. Maya just takes what she needs from Julian, she dominates him. It does make sense. She needs the control, to feel that its real after what happened in the first book. This book was better about the sentence repeats. I only noticed one time. Overall I can see where the writing matured considerably between these two books. But I enjoyed both of them for different reasons.
Comments
Post a Comment