I don’t have it in me right now to talk about this book in the way that it deserves. This is a book that explores the fallout from First Contact (and the fallout from covering up First Contact) in practically every way possible. There was so much going on in this book (and all of it done well), I don’t even know how to start summing it up. I’m tempted to just do the bullet points thing. In fact, you know what, fuck it. I’mma do that.
Here are some bullet points:
- Humanity being total shitbirds and people having existential crises about it
- Interspecies friendship.
- Interspecies love.
- Intense philosophical ideas.
- Cool as heck aliens.
- Exploration of complex PTSD and codependency.
- An age-gap romance that is fully aware of its own problematic nature.
- Scawwy. 😫
- Everything is nuanced.
- Beautiful writing, beautiful ideas. Sadness.
- If book three doesn’t have some sort of happy ending for Cora and Ampersand and Nikola (and maybe humanity) I will destroy everything.
Anyway, this series is great, sorry if you can’t tell from this review. Here’s a quote:
“In that way, America is synecdoche for humanity as a whole—capable of such feats of wonder, such innovation, such compassion, but also such greed, such exploitation, such consumption, such empire, and such cruelty. Are these truly traits of our shared human nature? Is this an inexorable, inescapable state of our being? Or is this all the result of a shared construct that we have erroneously agreed is a necessary evil of civilization, a fiction agreed upon, one that might be changed? If it is the latter, then perhaps we might be saved, but if it is the former, if our self-destructive tendencies arise not from construct but from our innate natures, then I truly believe that we will not survive. After a point, it is not even a question of surviving First Contact; outside intelligences need not be our own undoing if we can take care of our own destruction ourselves.”