Illuminae

 Hello Interwebs!

Here's another book review for you. This is the first YA Sci-Fi novel I've read in a really, really long time and quite frankly I loved it. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, is the first book in the Illuminae Files, a young adult sci-fi trilogy. As always spoilers abound after the picture. 

So Illuminae is written in a nontraditional found document format. The story is entirely told through interviews, emails, security footage analysis and various other documents. It tells the story through what I consider to be three primary characters: Kady Grant, Ezra Mason, and AIDAN. Kady and Ezra are both teenagers 17/18 years old. They were dating but broke up prior to the events of the book. 

The book opens on them being interviewed about the attack on their home of Kerenza IV, an illegal mining operation by the Lincoln battleship. The two of them are rescued by the military led by the military battleship, Alexander. Ezra is taken aboard the Alexander while Kady is taken aboard the scientific vessel, Hypatia. 

After the opening about the attack Ezra is enlisted as a fighter pilot while Kady is trained in computer analysis, although a hacker ends up enlisting her help in figuring out the truth of what's going on, especially after AIDAN, the AI aboard the Alexander orders a missile strike on the other science vessel with survivors, the Copernicus. A few escape ships reach the Alexander and are quarantined in one of the hangers. 

As the mystery unfolds, mostly discovered by Kady and her hacker buddies it is revealed that the Copernicus evacuated the mines on Kerenza IV, mines that were gassed by the attacking ships. The gas is some sort of bioweapon that turns the victims into murderous zombies, sort of akin to the Reavers in Firefly. Eventually AIDAN takes over the Alexander and releases the quarantined escapees from the Copernicus, gradually infecting the crew of the Alexander. 

As the crisis on the Alexander is unfolding Kady is lured over the Alexander with Aiden's promises that he'll help her rescue Ezra if she comes over and helps him battle the Lincoln. She hacks the systems on board the Alexander from various points on the ship, aided by AIDEN who helps her destroy the Lincoln as the Alexander is also destroyed and AIDEN with it. Kady escapes on an escape pod badly injured by radiation poisoning. When she wakes up she finds that Ezra is on the Hypatia, having been in one of the first groups to evacuate and never having been in danger on the Alexander at all. As she recovers they draw nearer to the jump base where they're not sure what they'll find. And that's where the first book leaves off. 

I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I was going to. It was a solid sci-fi story very similar to plotlines in the early seasons of the Battlestar Galactica reboot before it got weird. Kady and Ezra were interesting characters both individually and their relationship to each other. I consider the AI, AIDEN, to be a character of its own as it gains more and more sentience and acts towards Kady in a more human way than computer programming would normally allow. I haven't gotten around to them yet but I have the other two books in the trilogy, Gemina and Obsidio, waiting to be read. I really enjoyed this book and the nontraditional format of it. Despite being 600 some odd pages this was a very fast read and I was continually left hanging as to what was going to happen next and what was going on. 

I gave this book a solid five stars as well. I'm not usually the biggest fan of sci-fi but this one was really engaging and I look forward to the rest of the series. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle