Review: Aurora Rising ~ Amy Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

 

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Format I Used: Audiobook
Pages: 473
Running Time: 14h:4m
My Rating: 3 stars
Publication Date: May 17, 2019

This keeps flippity flopping between a 2 and a 3 star rating...I mean... It wasn't terrible. But also it wasn't my favorite either.  There are three reasons I ended up reading/listening to this book even though I do not read Sci-Fi books:

1. The cover is B E A U T I F U L (because Charlie Bowater is the bees knees)

2. It fit a prompt for a reading challenge that I am participating in.

3. I listened to The Illuminae Files, and thought they were pretty ace, so I figured, w h y n o t ?

So, like, I was intrigued by the whole premise and things started out a'ight, but then the farther it got into things, I started having problems. You know, despite the obvious that I kept wanting to compare it to Illuminae, but they're not even in the same universe. SO THEN WHY DID THE TWO KEEP BLENDING IN MY MIND?!

I wasn't crazy about Aurora. I was expecting her to be this hardcore heroine, but she was kind of...not. Maybe that will change in the next book?

I wanted to throttle Cat for 99.9 percent of the book, and by the time I decided she might be okay, it was too late.

Zila was almost forgettable, I wasn't really emotionally attached to her.

Scarlett was great, I wish she could be my BFF

Finn was okay, thank goodness for comic relief

Tyler was okay, I thought he was going to be Aurora's Love Interest and I almost rioted.

Kal was my broody alien Cinnamon Roll and I loved him so much.

I say that, but I did not like the romance between Aurora and Kal. It was like, Kal felt the pull to her, but she didn't even think about him romantically until he told her what he felt, which was pretty late into the story. I didn't like it. I wanted to see more of them together, falling in love and that just didn't happen. So boooooo.

So after telling you all what I didn't like... Here's some of what I did like.

I am ALL FOR audiobooks that have a full cast, especially when there are a bazillion characters. It helps me keep things straight in my head.

The friendships that happened and grew and blahbity blah. It is always nice read books where the characters have a good, tight relationship (like the Inner Circle)

I kinda liked the evil aliens at the end, and the whole Hive Mind thing that was going on (It reminded me of Ben 10:Alien Swarm)

If I can get my hands on the second book in audio form, I will probably listen to it, because if I start a series, I like to try and finish it, so we'll see.