Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

TL:DR Murphy's Law to the extreme

TBR: ~#880

finished 3/18/16

I was hoping this six hundred page book would last two three-hour car rides. It lasted the first one, and then I finished the book that night. (I didn't need it on the second ride, anyway. I fell asleep for most of it.) 

This book is a pretty big monstrosity, but it's not hard to get through. The whole story is told through mixed media, including:

• interview transcripts
• IM logs
• security camera footage narration
• e-mails
• AI narration

The last one was probably the strangest thing to read. And very unsettling. Point is, there was no real narrator and the entire story is told through what data an outside group can salvage. That threw me for a loop a couple times. (If you don't like an unreliable narrator, Illuminae probably isn't your thing.)

The mixed media format also allowed for censoring out curse words, which is pretty creative, but I'm kind of torn about it. It makes the book more accessible and allows for more curse words to be "included" into the dialogue, making it more realistic, but blacking them out makes it pretty ambiguous. There were quite a few times where I couldn't figure out what was supposed to be there. Imagining the wrong curse word in the context changes the implication of it.

Anyway.

I connected with the characters a lot faster than I expected. Especially considering so much of the story can be considered "missing", since there's no digital record of a lot of what happened. All of the characters go through hell and the ones that survive are probably still in for more.

The story is really dark and the events have multiple layers to them that isn't revealed right away (and I'm assuming there are going to be more implications in the subsequent books). There are a lot of gritty topics covered, and I feel like they were handled well, but that also means that nothing was really held back. This is definitely nowhere near being a fluffy book.

CWs I can think of off the top of my head: death, unreality, injuries and blood, war, and gaslighting.

And I'm almost certain there are more that I forgot to mention. Keep that in mind if any of those are important CWs for you.

Even with 600 pages of content, it feels like the ending of Illuminae is really only the beginning, and I'm really looking forward to Gemina. It looks like the trilogy is going to work the same way as the Starbound trilogy in that there are going to be new characters each book. I'm excited to see how that's used for the Illuminae series.

TL;DR it's a really unique storytelling format and a really compelling but super-dark book.

As a side note, keep an eye out for cameos. I had a lot of fun searching for them and I'm almost certain I only found a few of them.