Everything I can think of to say about this one makes it sound like I didn’t like it, but it really wasn’t bad! It’s the author’s second book, but it still really feels like a debut novel. But it feels like a debut from an author I would read more of. I feel like Tim Gunn telling a Project Runway contestant that they had too many good ideas and should have saved a couple for the next challenge. There were some really cool things going on, and a couple of fascinating characters, and an ending that was satisfying without wrapping things up too neatly.
It’s my second “generation ship leaves a doomed Earth” book in a row, but this one was better. Multiple ships landed (sometimes crashed) on Eleusis, and cultures set in quickly and pretty irrevocably. The folks in Dusk had the most surviving materials, so they built a city and have a bustling economy. The settlers in Dawn have all the farmland, so they provide the crops for the city, but they don’t have the equipment, so a lot of things are done painstakingly by hand while in the shadow of crashed spaceships. Those who landed in the freezing Night area did not survive long, and now the land is mostly occupied by the horrible villain Otoni, who steals children from other lands to build his tragic army.
This is going to get way too long – there are too many bits to recap! There’s a sentient world-protecting internet type thing. There are aliens who are mostly integrated into society (complete with spouses and half-human children), but who Otoni and many others hate because they’re the same aliens that attacked Earth generations ago and they can’t abide the current peace. There are people who agreed to be experimented on while they were in stasis on the trip to the new planet, so there are some successful and some not-so-successful mutations. There are mysterious telepathic crime-solving twins, who were very cool to read about. All this is going on, and I still haven’t gotten to the main character!
Cora was a child who was experimented on in stasis. She has eyes that glow amber, and she can phaseshift. When she’s kidnapped as a child for Otoni’s army (he’s always looking for the amber-eyed children), her life gets terrible. (Seriously, all the trigger warnings.) But her powers grow stronger as she gets older, and when her path takes her to the city and meeting the aliens face-to-face for the first time, things get explosive.
Like I said, there is a LOT going on. And more of it was successful than not. Some of the character shifts have odd writing choices – I did not care for the all-seeing network character – but Cora was fierce and amazing. I liked the way the pieces all came together. I liked all the well-lived-in cultures, from the outlanders in Dawn to the citizens of Dusk to the dimension-shifting aliens trying to atone for the sins of generations past. It all felt very ambitious, and I’m definitely going to check out more of Brissett’s work.