This was really good. The characters are well done. The story is original and interesting. It was sometimes a bit of an effort to get through, but mostly it read very well.
I usually enjoy characters that are not too typical, and in this case there were 2 autistic women, one of whom has a relationship with a third woman, and there was an angel who can change not only appearance, but also sex. So plenty of diversity, and all well done. In some books, the diversity can feel contrived, but here it felt natural.

Aside from that, I have to say that the bad guys were very well done as well. Partially because they don't feel too bad for a large part of the time. But they are extremely callous and I seriously wanted them to die by the end of the book. ( )

More like 2.5 or even two. Just didn’t catch me the story was there but nothing grabbed me and I found myself hoping I was going to get jazzed soon. This will be a no fly zone for book 2. ( )

Some cool concepts (post-singularity AI "gods" who basically control/shepherd humanity), some less than interesting concepts ("souls" are... energy, one of a number --seemingly quite a number-- of "energies" unknown to real-life physics, and the AI's harvest these souls...), all with a Lovecraftian twist: "alternative" physics exists (including, apparently, yet more types of "energy") and describes the Outside, which is both that alternative physics and the entities that exist in it.

Characters were a bit thin, the shoe-horning of Lovecraft into physics ended up feeling a bit forced (or maybe just ungainly), and to be honest, the climax depended a bit too much on what, underneath it all, was "and then magic made it work."

Really closer to 2 stars, but I'm giving the 1 since this is a first novel and for a first novel it's 3-star worthy. ( )

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Maybe. I had mixed feelings about the story.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Nancy Wu. I mostly liked her narration. I thought she fit well with the main character and did ok with maintaining consistent character voices for the secondary characters, although I thought she occasionally slipped in that regard. I thought she did particularly well with somehow conveying to the reader when a character’s words were spoken out loud versus internally, which could have gotten confusing otherwise. I imagine the print book has internal thoughts differentiated with italics or some such, but there weren’t always many clues in the actual words written, so it was really up to the narrator to convey that in the audio and she did well with it.

If I have any complaint in regard to the narration, it would be that the volume could be inconsistent. As a chapter went on, the narration tended to get softer and/or more whispery, and I would find myself straining more to hear, or else I’d give in and turn up the volume. Then the next chapter would begin and I’d jump at how loud it was.

Story
The story is set in the far future. There are multiple POV characters, but the main focus is on Yasira, a young autistic scientist who’s built a promising new engine thing that everybody is excited about. The story starts just before she activates it on the space station where she’s been working. Soon after she activates it, things start getting weird, and then they get worse than weird.

One concept introduced at the beginning of the book is that, a very long time ago, humanity built computers with artificial intelligence to serve as their gods. Yasira gets mixed up with angels who serve the most punitive of the gods, Nemesis. I really enjoyed that aspect of the world building and wouldn’t have minded seeing more of it.

“The Outside”, on the other hand, was the aspect of the world building that never made much sense to me. Maybe I missed some key descriptions during my audio listen, but the “explanations” for the Outside seemed vague and full of metaphysical mumbo jumbo. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the story more than I would normally enjoy a story that relies so heavily on abstract concepts.

The story itself held my interest well, and I really liked Yasira and her motivations. The other characters were mostly interesting to read about, but I didn’t become attached to any of them. I’m rating this at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 for Goodreads. ( )

This book... Where do I start?

It took me two months to read this book. I'm not a fast reader, but that's slow even by my standards. Please don't assume I read slowly because it was boring. And it's not as if it's hard science fiction, wherein I need to spend hours trying to understand the science being flung around all willy-nilly. It's not actually that science-intense.

Oh, but it is intense. Dense. Rich.

One time I bought a bottle of stout that was so exquisitely intense in its flavour (not to mention its alcohol content) that I couldn't drink more than a 100 mL at a time. This book is like that beer.

In the far future, Yasira is a physicist in charge of a new power reactor on a space station. Only instead of producing power like it's meant to, it tears a hole in the fabric of the universe. Some people escape, but many die. The space station is destroyed. And then the angel Akavi (working for the AI God Nemesis) comes for Yasira. She's guilty of unknowingly committing heresy, but because the one the Gods really want is Yasira's former mentor, Evianna, Akavi makes her an offer. Instead of killing her, she can work for them to help take town Evianna.

It's all very complicated and convoluted and wonderful. I think I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it, but I just don't have the words. ( )