“Perhaps bravery is simply the face humanity wraps around its collective madness.”

I sit here stunned and wiped out, breathless from the ride and in desperate need for my heart to restart. Even days later, I can still feel the shock.

There are no words for the amount of epic imagination and creativity that went into creating this story. This is not just a story, but a graphic visualization of corruption and artificial intelligence and all around badassness. I was strapped in from the first page, ready for takeoff, and I was not in the least disappointed.

“But what I do is not murder. It is mercy.”

Honestly, when you think this story is about one thing, it does a 180 and leaves you falling, only to catch you before your heart splats on the ground. You’ll be kept on the edge of your seat, reeling in the chaos of space.

Ok but really…..

I’ll be a little more technical now. No more fangirling. Just one more quote.

“She is a thief. A whisper. Melting through curtains of code and shadow like a knife through black water.”

Which segues us into character development. This entire story is told in the form of a dossier: paperwork, surveillance, journal entries, flight reports, audio clips, etc. Trust me when I say that this adds more to the story. But Kaufman and Kristoff’s ability to make characters pop from the page in IM messaging and random surveillance footage is downright borderline genius. There isn’t a way in this format to write drawn out character descriptions, giving readers deeper insights. Instead, we are forced, in somewhat dry documents, to determine why we love these characters. Kaufman and Kristoff pulled it off. Kady Grant might be my all-time favorite fictional character. Move over Katniss you have some serious competition now.

There are times when the visual representations added a depth to the story creating moments when you felt like you were flying. At one point, I was turning the entire book to read the words, swooping like a fighter jet to capture the observations by AIDEN. Even the breathless moments in space were shown on the page, though I have no idea how they pulled it off.

What more can I say? The story was original enough. I caught glimpses of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. The love story was well done and not overly dramatic. Many moments had me sitting in shock, unable to accept what had just happened. I’m not kidding when I say that I was sucked in.

One downside is that with the document style, I had a hard time keeping track of all the characters. Multiple times I had to go back and reference who the person was. This happened in a few critical moments which lost their overall shock. I’m taking this knowledge as I start the second book in hopes of fixing the problem.

I can’t wait to start the next one and, lucky me, the third one is already out. No need to suffer like most of humanity who discovered this series early on. I’m also very lucky to meet the authors next week and hopefully get all the books signed. I’ll be sharing the joyous moments on Instagram. And to wrap this up, if you couldn’t guess it, 5 out of 5 stars. If I could, this book would be getting all the stars in the universe (do you see what I just did there? *insert cheeky smile*).

Love Kait