Aurora Rising: Sleeping Beauty Meets The Island of Misfit Toys for a Space Adventure

The backstory of this review . . .

Last week I was driving back from Jackson Hole with some friends when the conversation got around to books. Now, I love giving book recommendations. I can’t recommend for every genre or age group, but if you read young adult, I’ve got you covered for just about everything except high fantasy (and if you read that, you’ve probably got six or seven 1000-page books to go before you need another recommendation, so you’re good).

So, driving through the fields of southern Wyoming, I recommended The Selection series for my friend Julia. If you haven’t read it, it’s the book version of The Bachelor and the literary equivalent of eating cotton candy—way too much sugar, but so addictive, you can’t stop eating. In the middle of my recommendation, her husband, Matt, broke in and said, “You should put book reviews on your blog. If you write them like you’re describing this for Julia, that would be really interesting. People might start coming to your blog to find new stuff to read. You might get a big following.”

I said, “Hm. Okay, I’ve always thought about reviewing books but never gotten around to it—I’m going to give it a try.” So this book review is dedicated to Matt and Julia (and their predictions of my future big following).

Book review: Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

The logline of this book says it all: “They’re not the heroes we wanted. They’re just the ones we could find.” Ha! What an introduction to this book.

To summarize the synopsis from the back cover, this is a story about a space squad of misfits who stumbles on a secret of galactic importance. It’s told from seven different points of view, and it doesn’t really matter whose perspective you’re reading at the moment—they’re all hilarious. Tyler is the first person we see, and he’s rescuing a girl who’s been trapped in cryo-sleep for over two centuries. Turns out her name is Aurora (I sense a Sleeping Beauty joke) and she’s had strange powers bestowed on her during her centuries of sleep, but she doesn’t know how or why (or how to control them). Unfortunately, in rescuing her, Tyler, the star student at his school (think the UN for teens, set in space), missed the draft in which he would have recruited a killer squad from amongst his fellow students to work with for the next year. Instead, he gets left with the kids with anger management issues and whacko personalities. Sucks to be him.

But when the squad gets sent on their first (and totally lame-o) mission, they find out that Aurora was instructed to stow away on their ship for her own safety and that she’s being chased by the special ops of the galaxy, who will stop at nothing to get their hands on her—and none of the teens, including Aurora herself, know why. But over the course of the book, they go on an epic adventure to find out!

So that’s the synopsis of the book for you. I’ll hit a few more highlights, then wrap up.

Humor: The humor was to DIE for. Every character had their own flavor, but they were all spot-on. As an example, one of the characters is this sociopath girl named Zila who’s super smart but super antisocial. You get the first chapter from her perspective maybe a third of the way into the book, and all it says is, “Hmm. My current situation could be adequately described as . . . suboptimal.” Ha! It barely gives you anything, but it perfectly fits this girl. Then you’ve got Aurora, girl out of time, who keeps saying things like, “Holy cake,” and Cat, tomboy pilot, who blows up at her and asks, “Why can’t you just swear like a normal person?” before remembering that Aurora is technically over two centuries old and is in no way normal.

Surprise: I did not anticipate the turns this book took. In some places, I felt like the story was wandering a little, but the characters were so fun that I didn’t mind. The end, where the “bad guys” are revealed, wasn’t at all what I expected—in an interesting way but also in a “huh, okay, I hope you authors can follow up on this and not choke like so many similar stories do!” I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just leave that there, and if you read the book, we can talk.

Emotions: So. Many. Emotions! The end of the book ripped my heart into pieces. I don’t expect fun sci-fi adventures to be moving, but man, this one’s ending sucker punched me in the gut. It also set me up to need the next book (whose publication date is TBA) like, RIGH’NOW. Again, don’t want to spoil stuff, so read it and then come find me to talk.

And that finishes up my review of Aurora Rising! Last plug for it—I talked so much about loving this book that my boyfriend, Bobby, decided to read it, too. I didn’t even try to get him to read it; I was just so excited about it that my enthusiasm rubbed off on him. How’s that for a recommendation?