Title: Obsidio
Author: Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff
Series: The Illuminae Files #2
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 615
Published: 2018, Alfred A. Knopf
My Grade: 3.5 out of 5

GOODREADS’ DESCRIPTION

Kady, Ezra, Hanna and Nik narrowly escaped with their lives from the attacks on Heimdall station and now find themselves crammed with 2,000 refugees on the container ship, Mao. With the jump station destroyed and their resources scarce, the only option is to return to Kerenza–but who knows what they’ll find seven months after the invasion?

Meanwhile, Kady’s cousin, Asha, survived the initial BeiTech assault and has joined Kerenza’s ragtag underground resistance. When Rhys–an old flame from Asha’s past–reappears on Kerenza, the two find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. With time running out, a final battle will be waged on land and in space, heroes will fall, and hearts will be broken.

MY REVIEW

The third installation in the Illuminae Files series took me way too long to finish, 9 months. Wow. Not okay! Which is probably the main reason why I didn’t enjoy it as much either. It was a long time ago that I read Gemina and I didn’t really enjoy reading such a big hardcover book (since I’ve gotten used to reading on my ereader) and therefore finished several ones on my ereader while trying to finish this brick. It’s not a heavy book to read, it’s an as easy read as the first two in the series, still written in the same cool way with compiled files. Many video transcriptions, which makes sense in the scenes of this book. But the physical book is big and I didn’t have it as an e-book.

Since it took me so long to finish it, I found it very hard to remember the characters, but then the winter holidays came and I finished more than half in just a few days and I got into it again and remembered everything that happened before so it’s not my laziness that drags down the grade a bit. When I started reading a lot again, I still had a very hard time understanding the characters and telling who was who. Maybe that is the downside of writing in chat logs and radio transmissions? But still, the authors manage to get that high level of details and complexity in the story perfect. And this type of writing really works well with action. The end and conclusion to this trilogy really ends well. Without spoiling, the ending was not unexpected but very satisyfing still.

The other books in this trilogy got fours, but because of how difficult it was to keep track on the characters (especially the ones up on the ship, the characters down on Kerenza IV was very easy to know), the grades lowers a bit to a 3.5.

But all in all: a really interesting and fascinating space battle story well worth your time!