Nophek Gloss

I read this book slowly because I wanted to make it last. It is another incredible work of storytelling. Caiden is an excellent character, even though there were definitely moments I wanted to shake him. I absolutely loved his found family, and mourned his losses with him. Seriously, the speed at which the author made me love some of these characters was astounding.

Essa does a brilliant job of drawing the reader into Caiden’s world and then rapidly expanding it as his understanding expands, so the reader gets to feel Caiden’s awe and disorientation (without it being overwhelming). The aliens are really alien and so cool, and yet at the core they’re just people, as it should be. Shades of grey are everywhere throughout this book, and Caiden wrestles with morality as much as he wrestles with his (justified) anger. Every secondary character felt fully realized and fleshed out, and they stepped right off the page with their own traumas and their own goals, and I loved them. Well, except one. He can still rot, even if he feels like a whole person. Even many of the tertiary, background characters felt fully realized, despite seeing them for a short time, and I love the way they add a layer of history to the crew.

The universe felt vast and the factions felt real, with good people crossing paths with Caiden along with really-not-nice-at-all people. But even the antagonists are fleshed out and multi-dimensional, with factions within factions (sometimes within factions!), and I loved the peeks into the wider politics of the universe. And what a universe it is—vast and multi-layered, with universe bubbles touching universe bubbles, each with varying physics and other conditions, and that was just so cool. The tech was super cool, too, and the gloss leads to some Spice-like economic-political shenanigans.

In addition to all this, Essa manages to wrestle big questions with thoughtfulness and I really appreciated that. Caiden’s quest for revenge and how much he risks for it, the questions of how responsible he is for things that happen that he can’t prevent, and the way he slowly learns to look beyond monsters to see if the heart of the monster is really a monster or not. Just masterfully done, I thought. A ton of action is packed into this book, yet it begins and ends rather slowly and thoughtfully, counter-pointing the gripping, hectic pace of some of the chapters in the middle.

So in short, if you enjoy sci-fi with alien aliens, multi-layered societies, three dimensional characters, emotional intensity, and questions of morality, you need to read this book.

And then we can all want our own pet nopheks together.

For those interested, the main character is ace-spectrum, and there's fantastic trans, nonbinary, and #OwnVoices neurodivergent representation in this book too. (En is the best supporting friend ever.)