by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
First sentence: “… over seven hundred thousand employees across dozens of colonized worlds.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Illuminae
Content: All the swear words are blacked out, but there’s a lot of violence and some drug use. It’s in the Teen section (grades 9+) of the bookstore.

Spoilers for the first one, probably.

The nice thing about not reading a series when it first comes out is that you can read them all one right after another. And I remember what happens! That said, Gemina is part of the whole story, and picks up where we left off, but it also it’s own thing.

It’s the space station Heimdall, and everything is going lovely for Hannah and her boyfriend Jackson for their Terra Day plans. She’s got a super cute outfit, she’s about to pick up some dust to make the party super lit. Except, while she’s on her way, the station is attacked by an elite crew of 24 “auditors” (read: assassins) from BeiTech corp, who is still trying to cover up their attack on Kerenza. They have orders to take over Heimdall and open up the wormhole before any survivors reach the jump station.

(There’s a bit of a gap here: how did BeiTech know that there were survivors from the Kerenza attack?)

Anyway. The assassins capture the station, kill the commander (who happens to be Hannah’s dad), and take over. But, a few people Hannah and her drug dealer, Nik, and Nik’s cousin Ella, who’s a hacker, are left on the outside to stop the assassins from completely taking over.

I wondered how this would go over in print, since I adored it so much in audio. And it’s fabulous. I’m amazed that Kauffman and Kristoff could put so much into just documents, text streams, and illustrations, but they do! (since this one is so heavily illustrated, I wonder how it is in audio?) It never got tedious, I adored the reveals as they happened, and I was never too far ahead of the characters. I figured something out, and by the next page, the characters were there as well. It’s quite brilliantly plotted. And they do tension SO very well. I kept having to take breaks as I read because it would just get too much for me to handle. So very very good.

And yes, I’ve got the third already checked out, so I can see how this story ends.