This Shattered World by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner

TL;DR don't let companies try to terraform

(finished 9/18/15)

This Shattered World was #1070 on my TBR. I reviewed These Broken Stars back in October last year, but it's honestly felt like it's been more than 11 months since I read it.

Like I mentioned with These Broken Stars, TSW was a big book with tiny print. It felt like it took forever to read it (even though it took me less than a week). It also took me longer than I would've wanted to become invested in the story; the plot and the characters are good, but it wasn't until the 70% mark that I actually really cared about what was going on.

I liked the characters, but like I said, it took longer than it should've for me to really care about them. They were just characters for a good majority of the book. Lee and Flynn's relationship also didn't seem to have much development to it, though I'm kind of figuring I may have just missed it considering how obvious Lilac and Tarver's development was in TBS.

Also speaking of Lilac and Tarver, TSW took a lot longer than I expected to connect back to the previous book. I actually kind of forgot they were in the same universe until about 60% in when Lee calls her former captain for advice. I can understand that the connection had to wait that long in order to establish Avon and what was going on, but I honestly forgot about TBS for a good while.

Wow. I really feel like I don't have much to say OTL Despite everything I've said so far, I ended up rating TSW four stars. It's really just me as the reader that's unimpressed; it's a good book. The characters are pretty solid and the plot and setting are interesting. I think it was put together well. I think it's really just the fact that I had such trouble trying to focus on the book when it took me a significant portion of time to read a spread of pages.

Something I do remember thinking about is the fact that I don't know how the science really checks out, between the terraforming and the space travel stuff, but I didn't notice anything terribly wrong. (I'm also not a scientist. Please forgive me.) I haven't read many books in regards to interstellar colonization -- something I mentioned in my TBS review -- so I really don't have any experience in regards to stuff like this.

TL;DR it's a good sci-fi but I had trouble focusing on it because of how huge the hardcover is and how tiny its print is. Probably not your thing if you don't like very science-y stuff.