I've read this book in my Kindle |
Published:
2015
Genre: Science
Fiction
My
Rating: 5 stars
I was quite disappointed with last month’s Knight of a Trillion Stars, so for this,
my second review for the Out of this World Challenge, I wanted something completely
different. And here it is: a science fiction book with a dark tone, M/M romance
and published in 2015. And my experience was quite the opposite, I really liked
this book.
It’s quite angsty and dark, shit happens. I knew that from
the beginning, just by reading the synopsis. Therefore, I was not very sure if
I could cope with it. But I did. With flying colours.
The main character in this book is Tover Duke. And
he’s the reason why this book worked so well. It’s one of those characters that
you feel has to exist somewhere, he
is so real!
He’s an improvisational navigator, a person who can move
anything instantly across light-years of space using the powers of his mind. Only
forty-two people in the whole universe can do what he does. So he’s very
valuable for the corporation that has trained him and employs him, the Harmony
Corporation. Such a highly qualified employee deserves the treatment of a rock
star. He’s got fame and money, and lives in a very luxurious hotel. He has this
crush with a mysterious engineer, Cruz Arcadio. They have sex sometimes when
that man goes to the DK station Tover works in. The navigator cannot stop
thinking about him.
Then comes his birthday and they give him a party. He
goes, hoping to find Cruz there. And he does, but not in the way he expected.
Cruz takes him hostage and uses him to get out of the station.
Then, Cruz gives Tover to these cruel smugglers who
want to use him as a navigator. In the hands of these awful men, Tover suffers humiliation,
pain and torture. He tries to do the right thing, but he’s got his limits. Whenever
he remembers Cruz, he only feels hatred towards that man that has put him in
this predicament. He remembers the times when he thought his lover could be
something else, and that only adds to the depth of his betrayal.
There are scenes with ‘extreme violence and assault’
the warning says. Well, I wouldn’t say ‘extreme’ but yes, there’s graphic violence.
Not sexual, I have to add. That’s precisely why I thought that perhaps I was
not going to be able to enjoy this book. But once you accept that it has a lot
of angst and pain, and that the personal redemption of both main characters
implies a lot of suffering, you really can enjoy it.
I read it very quickly, I couldn’t put it down. I
really liked Tover, and I understood his feelings, his actions. It’s amazing
the way he grows up and changes, and discovers that his wonderful flamboyant
life as a navigator star had its shadows. He’s a wonderful character and
deserves his happy ending, even if it implies personal loses.
Cruz was a more difficult to accept. Unless you –at
least- accept why he gives Tover to the pirates, you cannot enjoy this book. There’s
not at lot of grovelling, but at least he recognizes it was his fault, he
accepts that what he did was awful, and that Tover has every right to be angry
and want to kill him.
Cruz does not change much from the beginning to the
end. He’s an engineer, yes, but has also military training. He’s hard, but has
always had a place in his heart for Tover and only wants an opportunity to be
forgiven. Even as he knows that Tover belongs to a different world, and the
possibility of a happy ending is quite small.
There are sexy scenes, wonderfully well written, and
they add to the story!
And there were magic moments, I specially remember a
moment when Tover, who loves birds, spends hours watching hornbills in a
valley.
The ‘science-fiction’ part of the story was quite
interesting. The world building was amazing. I really felt taken to another
planet, and the author does this without lots of info dump. The universe is
full of planets with different kind of humans. In order to colonize foreign
planets and exploit them, the Harmony Corporation terraforms them. And the
question that the book asks is how much suffering and destroying of native life
forms is required in order to do that. Tover has never questioned colonizing
other planets. But Cruz comes from a planet with a carbon dioxide atmosphere.
If Harmony terraforms it, it would be the end for the human and native species
from that planet.
Anyone with a conscience can easily relate to the
problems of destroying the environment, the resources, and traditional way of
living of other people just to support the privileged existence of a little
group. In a way, Tover’s flamboyant and glamorous way of living reminded me of
the Capitol in The Hunger Games
–people whose wonderful richness was based on the submission of millions. The
option of making Carida, Cruz’s planet, one in which everybody speak Spanish
and have Spanish names, makes this book a very obvious political –or at least
social- statement.
I really enjoyed this book. A lot. When I ended it, I
thought this is a 4-star book for me. Why? If everything was so great? Well, it
was because of a silly thing. Once and again someone spoke Spanish and it was,
generally speaking, well written. But sometimes the sentences were
grammatically wrong and of course he author did not use one single accent, and
while I was reading, I wanted a red pen to put that diacritical mark here and
there; that took me out of the story. These mistakes bugged me.
But as the days passed I forgot my red-pen problems
and I only remembered how impressive the world-building was, and how great Tover
was and how this was a book I really really enjoyed quite above my average
experience. So the grade went from 4 to 5.
This is a book worth giving it a try. It’s my first
read by Astrid Amara, but I have this feeling it will not be my last.
A 5 stars review of this book can be found in
Scattered Thougths and Rogue Words.
2015, Samhain |
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