Rating: 2 out of 5

Genre: Scifi / Fantasy, Diverse, Young Adult

People who should read this: If you love the Alien Universe, horror books, diverse love stories, and sci fi stories. 

I couldn’t find anything technically wrong with Alien: Echo. It was clear and crisp and filled with a lot of diverse content that impressed me. 

This just wasn’t the right time for me to read it.

There are a lot of books about gay guys. This seems to be the trend. But how many books have you read with the lead being a female that’s gay? I can’t even name one outside of Alien: Echo. And Grant jumps right in, not wasting time on the coming out portion. Olivia knows what she wants and expects the reader to know as she goes through the pains of her first real crush. 

So if you thought this book was all killing aliens and sci fi madness, you’re sorely mistaken. The book easily has a foot in both worlds. 

On top of that, Grant also created a great alien planet. Most people fall into the trap of creating bipedal creatures, sticking within the limitations of their imaginations. Grant somehow found a way to blend the known with the unknown. I mean, she created carnivorous grass. Who does that? Oh right… Grant. 

Yet, with all of this, there was nothing to suck me into the book’s pages. I was left drifting as I counted down the words until I was done. 

“Why did you even finish it?” you ask. 

You should be familiar with this answer by now… it was for book club. Yay! 

Nothing caught my attention. I didn’t even care who lived or died in the end, the middle, or the beginning. And talk about the beginning, this book took forever to set up. I’m not talking about massive world building. No. It spent time setting up long drawn out connections between the characters that didn’t ultimately matter in the end. Illuminae dropped readers right into the middle of a shit storm and I didn’t need to know the intimate relationship between the characters to feel that something was at stake. Even with this attention to detail, I still didn’t care in the end. 

No two horror books are the same, but there must be a level of suspense that will keep the readers in there seats. And there doesn’t need a lick of scariness to keep readers in there seats. Alien: Echo lacked all of it though. I didn’t know how the ending was going to go exactly, but it’s not that hard to guess. I wasn’t worried even if the ending went completely wrong… because I will repeat. I didn’t care about a single character. I was connecting with them.

I’m also learning that Grant has a tendency of lacking story. At least enough to fill your average size book. To fill her book to the required word count, she kept repeating the same information over and over. At one point I was rolling my eyes. I get it. I get the character’s feelings by this point. Can we move on? How about you explain how the protagonist got from one point to another because I’m confused about it. There was so much more she could have padded the story with. That list includes more descriptions, more plot, more suspense, more anything else. You can’t say that Grant isn’t concise with her writing. It’s clear and to the point which leads to a very dry book that has room to grow. I need a story to breathe. 

Yet, with all of these complaints, I wouldn’t say the book is bad in any way. I struggled giving my rating on Goodreads. I didn’t want the world to think my two stars were due to a bad story. It’s just not my story. All the things I love, all the things that draw me right in, were missing. And it’s ok in the quick little novella’s that she writes, you expect the information to be packed into a tight package, but these longer works have room for breathing and more descriptions. For the characters to feel more fleshed out. I’ll have to read something else by her to know if this is just her style and I’ll never be able to love her like I want to.

Happy Reading

Love Kait

Reading Challenge: 91/110