Review: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Challenges: 

Around the Year in 52 Books: Epistolary fiction

This book is perhaps not epistolary fiction strictly speaking, but it is definitely written in a different format. We have chat logs, reports from different officials, statistics and all sorts of other things. It’s a very visual book, and I think the format works well for the story. 

In this book we follow Kady Grant. Her planet has recently been attacked and she has been saved and taken on board a space ship. However, the attackers are in hot pursuit and soon it becomes difficult to tell friend from enemy when a zombie-like virus and a willfull AI main computer throw some wrenches in the machinery. Being a skilled hacker Kady decides to figure out just exactly what is going on and what she discovers runs far deeper than she expected. 

This story was action from start to finish, but peppered with great friendships, relationships, philosophical and moral musings and twisting plots. I loved Kady as a character, she is intelligent, sarcastic and altruistic when push comes to shove. Pretty much all of the other characters were well defined, even though we only saw some of them for very short passages. I only had trouble with a few of the military persons, mainly because they called each other by their rank, and I can never remember ranks. 

I gave this book 4 stars out of 5, simply because my thirsty heart wanted more of the relationship.