Good job with the story line and could have drawn out the details here and there but didn't. Not sure how I feel about that. Could have used some more character building but worth reading and will continue with the second book in the series. ( )

Under-rated!

I really don't hear many people talking about this book & I don't know why? Now don't get me wrong it's not the best as I feel some of it is a bit rushed but overall it has a solid plot & characters. When I first read this it was the first real sci-fi set in space type of book I had read & really enjoyed it. Now getting round to the re-read before I read the sequel, having read other sci-fi books since then I was worried I would be disappointed with this one, but alas I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time round.

Would recommend to any one who wants a quick, action packed sci-fi read. ( )

For every book there is a reader, and I hoped to be a match with this one. I picked it up because the synopsis of the second book in the series looked interesting, but also very much like a second book in a series. As it turns out, I tried really hard to like Empress of a Thousand Skies, but I just couldn't make it work. Maybe I'm not just in the right mood for it, or maybe I'm getting too old for this kind of book.

There were two things that really bothered me about the story and one thing that was annoying but not the book's fault: the world-building and the characters are the biggies, and the misleading cover synopsis is the minor. Unfortunately, world-building and characters are two thirds of a book, and the plot wasn't enough to carry the story for me. But I feel safe in saying what I didn't like are things other people will like.

World-building: this is a fantasy revenge quest dressed up in science fiction clothes. I found much of the sf to be highly implausible and lost a lot of enjoyment in reading because I kept losing my suspension of disbelief at some of the supposed science. Worse, a lot of the concepts could have been fascinating from a hard science perspective but were handwaved magic. It actually reminds me a lot of Star Wars now that I think of it, from the revenge/escape plot to the minimal scientific dressing of the magic. There are a lot of alien people, and I do think that was a positive element. The people are mostly humanoid, but they aren't all human. The different planets and moons, despite being one of the more implausible things, have a lot of diversity, too. But I couldn't figure out if this story takes place in a single solar system or across a galaxy, and why places were called "quadrants" when apparently the quadrants are static to the planets instead of the orbits rotating through?? Time, too, seems to not have any differences, even though it can't possibly be 9am everywhere.

Basically, I really like my science fiction to aim for some scientific realism and consistency with known physics, or at least not constantly throw the rule-breaking at me (keep it confined to one planet or ship or something).

Characters: the main characters are all teenagers and it shows. They're impulsive and melodramatic, and while Alyosha seems to have some self-preservation instincts, Rhiannon never seems to think about her actions. She also has been raised to be a ruler but doesn't seem to have actually taken any of it to heart. There's a lot of emphasis on how much happened in their young childhoods, but very little about Rhee's recent life to explain her characterization, so it feels like she's stuck at 6 years old sometimes. I can see this as a fascinating side effect of the cube's memory recording and thus always having memories vividly at hand, but the author doesn't really explore that.

The plot is drawn out and doesn't match the synopsis on the cover at all. Supposedly, Rhee and Aly are both on the run together from people who are trying to kill them, but they never actually meet in the book. There are a lot of standard plot tropes that get waved around as possible foreshadowing and twists, but they're so late and weak that it feels like the entire book is just a prologue. It dragged, and the misleading synopsis made it worse. It makes me dread looking into the sequel, which is the thing that made me interested in the series in the first place.

I really wish the plot had been trimmed up and character motivations were more firmly established. I wish that the two main characters didn't spend the entire book never quite meeting, and that Rhee at least wasn't so dumb. I also wish that if we had to go with the sci-fi setting and concepts, it were confined to a single planet or spaceship or something, to help with the implausibility problem. ( )

Ahahaha, this book.

Dear lord this book.

The cover was pretty, there was some hype, the idea was beautiful.

Let's address problem no.1: "For fans of Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles."

Fans of TLC: This book is not for you. Oh yes, I know it specifically says "For fans of Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles" but the thing with TLC is that it is beautiful. Inspiring. Amazing. *sighs and fangirls* Guys this was like a piece of terrible TLC fanfiction. No it was much worse than that. I can't even begin to explain how bad it was. Who in the name of publishing allowed this lie to be printed all over the book?

Problem no.2: The characters.

Oh the characters. I had no emotional connection to them whatsoever. It was like someone took names and moved them around. The characters were so shallow, so unemotional, so uninspiring. And what really sucked, is there was SO MUCH the author could have done with them! I can't even remember the names (that's how bad this was) but the weird guy from that natural planet thing? He could have been so cool. You could have really made him this mysterious, really cool kind of character. But what does the author do?

Hmm... what does the author do?

It brings us to...

Problem no.3: Disappearing Characters

That nature dude I was talking about (god I feel bad about not remembering his name)? I don't even know where he went. Like did he die? Was he killed? I know at one point some guard dude caught him but after that, we literally don't see him for the rest of the book. He's not even mentioned again, save for a few times Rhee thinks about what she didn't trust him (she totally has this weird love thing going on, I swear. It drove me insane!)

The Vincent dude who like totally died randomly? He was probably the only character that I liked and would have wanted to see more of. But then he just disappeared. When they introduced Lydia?

She probably had like 10 pages of where she tried to explain the past 30 years of her life and answer all of these "questions" we had throughout the book and then just decided to die Wow. *slow clap*

Problem no.4: The "plot twists"

Ooh see those quotation marks?

"Plot twists"

Le moi during "plot twist"


Overall, I could go on and on and on about how much I disliked this book, but I'm telling myself not to be rude. *fails*

I didn't even get started on world building...

I don't even want to go there.

This book had so much potential. SO MUCH! And it was just wasted. Absolutely wasted. ( )