Aurora Rising

Aurora Rising

By Aime Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the academy would touch . . .

A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm
A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates
A smart-ass tech whiz with the galaxy's biggest chip on his shoulder
An alien warrior with anger-management issues
A tomboy pilot who's totally not into him, in case you were wondering

And Ty's squad isn't even his biggest problem--that'd be Aurora Jie-Lin O'Malley, the girl he's just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler's squad of losers, discipline cases, and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.

NOBODY PANIC.

 I can't tell if I'm getting grumpier as I get older, or if books are just not as good as they used to be (spoiler alert: it's definitely the former).  I wanted to like this one, I swear!  I was very much looking forward to it, and in fact was using it to get a break from two other books I thought I would like, but were moving much too slowly for me to enjoy. 

However.  There are few things more obnoxious than a band of teenagers who talk like they're in a television show written by adults, and manage to save the world because they are so extraordinarily talented but also they're misfits so no one knows how talented they are, and also somehow they're smarter than all the adults.  

I mean, we start promisingly, with the premise that only young folks' minds are malleable enough to endure the space Fold, so there's a school for young people.  But then to say, well, each crew will have one teenager who can engineer anything, and another one will be both medical and science expert, and also there's a teen diplomat, because why not, and apparently there's a fighter too, and each of them is somehow experts even though they've been in school from age 13-18, and frankly teenagers don't know how to do any job, let alone highly skilled, technical job which would be vastly easier with some life experience.  I mean, no knock on teenagers, but they're barely out of puberty, and they simply didn't have enough time to learn anything.  You can do a lot of things in science fiction, but 18 is still 18.

And it wasn't even that, which killed my enjoyment, or the fact that all of them employed such finely crafted sarcasm and quips you'd think they'd been to school for that for five years instead of whatever else... diplomacy, I guess, although there wasn't much of it displayed in the book.  

Nor was it that the teachers apparently smuggled this Aurora person on board without telling anyone, because... a team of misfit trainees who have no idea they're carrying a stowaway is the solution to a police investigation? No, not even that!

It was in fact, when (after witnessing a mass genocide almost in passing which is then never referred to again) they wind up on a disreputable "pirate" station which has... a world galactic-class museum!  Yes! With an aquarium and a gala for the public. What public, you may ask? Presumably the other pirates on station.  And why host a gala? I can assume because the rich and powerful gangster who owns all the art pieces wants to be fair and give random teenagers a chance to steal something.  Which they do. Because they're magically talented, in case you didn't know!  They can come up with gala ready clothes and a plan to infiltrate a genetically coded lock on less than 24 hours' notice. 

If you're getting the sense that I was not "along for the ride" you are correct.  I did not get into the spirit of things, I didn't just relax and enjoy the humor, I was not charmed.  It felt obnoxiously cutesy and trite and cliche, in an unironic way.  I felt like I'd read the evil plant story before, too.  It kind of echoed the Big Bad in the Murderbot novel, Network Effect.  

So the pilot is consumed by the plant and the rest of the kids manage to escape and the one decides she might date the elf after all, and I just couldn't bring myself to care.

8: A Book with a Protagonist Who Uses a Mobility Aid