MY RATING : ★★★★★/5
Recommend for fans of : Illuminae and Ready Player One
I think the title is self-explanatory, plus, I just finished this book. I have so many things to say about it that’s why I decided to write my review RIGHT AWAY with fresh emotions you know. I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews for this book and I’m going to say this : you either find it MEH or Love it. I’m fortunate enough to find myself TO ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS BOOK.
Now each recruit must earn the right to travel down to the planet of Eden—a planet that Babel has kept hidden—where they will mine a substance called Nyxia that has quietly become the most valuable material in the universe.
We follow around a team of young people recruited by Babel Communications who would do anything for money even compete against each other in order to be prepared to live on another planet. While I always hate the setting of having teenagers settling on another planet like The 100 Tv Show, this book turns it around and succeeded to completely suck me in the story. Because this WHOLE NOVEL is not about living on Eden, it’s about the journey to Eden. It’s a journey of competition, friendship forming, enemies and what are you willing to do to achieve what you want the most. Then.. there’s a twist near the end that I love making the competition even harder. A twist like in Gemina and Illuminae..
THERE GUYS. That’s what interesting. Scott Reintgen created a Ready Player One competition on board of Space Ship. GENIUS.
Oh hell yes. There are a lot of actions. Every now and then we get to learn a little bit about Eden and Babel Communications while the contestants have to duel each other. The Nyxia element contributed greatly to the story, it’s a dark substance that you can manipulate and it will transform into whatever you want it to be, except into nutriments. That’s the only “mystical” element in the story and I thought it was great! Very well described and we get to see the extensions and limitations of its powers.
OKAY THIS RIGHT HERE. THIS IS WHY I FCKN CRIED 3 TIMES IN THIS BOOK. The characters have soo much depth and their dynamics are just too good that whenever there were a peak of emotions or something sad happened I cried like a baby. Yup.
Emmett : the main character who’s afro-american (btw it’s so rare to read about male main characters in YA Sci/Fantasy y’alllll ) dealing with a tons of psychological problems and mostly his anger issues. He has a great family value and one scene is him talking to his parents via videoconference that I burst out crying in the subway. THAT’S HOW ATTACHED I WAS TO HIS FAMILY.
Kaya: She’s Japanese and an absolute sweetheart, smart and very strategic. She is a quick problem solver and how she and Emmet interact WAS JUST SO SWEET. Now youre gonna say okay its romance right? NO MOTHERFCKER. IT WASNT. ITS FCKN FRIENDSHIP AND IM.SO.HAPPY. Because Kaya was my absolute favourite, her personality and how she helped Emmet so unconditionally reminds me how I would help my closest friends . For that way I didn’t see her as a potential romance to Emmet and the author didn’t do that move so thank you author. .
This is where I saw some reviews criticizing how Babel Communications translation mask design is not realistic. Okay first, I thought this was one of the most realistic aspect in my YA Sci-Fi experience. Some authors always forget about the fact that people come from different countries and do not speak the same language or even people from other planets.. don’t speak our language. In Nyxia, this mask sets the tone to the book, it allows all the people from all over the world to communicate. So hear me out how this is possible:
- The book is set in the future where they have enough resources to even discover a new planet so I think they developed the right AI to have a translation accuracy close to human-level accuracy.
- Babel Communications … is .. a company.. focused on..COMMUNICATIONS DAMN IT. I don’t know if you heard about Babel but the name refers to the Babel Tower and Babel Communications is a kind of irony see…they want to bring people together, so everyone can understand each other in their own languages.
There’s a sequel! I’m kind of excited about it but not too much since I stated below, when it’s about a bunch of teenagers living on other planets..ehh. But this author has totally surprised me with this book so let’s hope for the best for the second one 😉 I loved this book so much that I made some quotes art 😀
Big thank you to Penguin Random House for sending me this copy in exchange for an honest review 🙂
My Dark Theories 
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