Illuminae

Title: Illuminae (Illuminae Files #1)
Author: Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Initial Thoughts: That was....brilliant.

Intense. Love and action and rogue AI, spaceships and bio-warfare, thousands of lives lost but still hundreds saved. It was epic and awesome and why did I wait so long to read it? Honestly, I only picked this one up because it kept cropping up in a bookish fb group I'm in and I wanted to know what all the hype was about. I get it now. I don't actually even know what to say other than that it was brilliant and awesome and amazing and I absolutely cannot wait to read the next one (though I will have to wait because I already have a number of other books from the library that need reading before they are due back :P). The one thing I will say pertaining to an actual specific part of the story and not just it's overall epicness (I need to find more synonyms for awesome...) is that I was definitely blindsided by AIDAN saying that Ezra had died. I had not figured that. With it, though, I figured Kady was for sure going to die as well. Most books I read don't actually kill off the main character (supporting characters, yes, but not your narrator) but I was fully expecting this one to do so and to actually be okay with it. I couldn't see Kady being happy with her life once Ez had died. I don't condone going and killing yourself if someone you loves dies, that is actually a terrible thing to do, but I totally could have seen her doing it and I wouldn't have been annoyed at the authors for writing it in. I don't like killing off characters (even nameless ones, like seriously, that was over 2,000 characters that died just on the Alexander alone and they all had lives and families and I know they're just characters but loss of life is never acceptable - inevitable, yes, but not acceptable), and I actually might have cried had Kady died, but I wouldn't have railed against it. It would have been a little beautiful, even. Romantic in that she was going to join the only person she had left. (That probably still sounds kind of terrible, but even though I say I hate characters dying because of loss of life, I do know that they're characters and I can appreciate the necessity and beauty in their deaths because I do know that they aren't actually real.) Anyway, yay for them both being alive! Another thing I did catch on to was that her mother was on the Copernicus because Kady never mentioned her and avoided talking about her and would just continue the conversation or change the subject when Ezra would bring her up. That I did catch, though I was a bit confused because I knew she had started out on the Hypatia with Kady. It was explained and I'm all good. I loved the format of the book with the different files and everything. Genius. Also, for anyone reading it later, that pulse in binary code does actually say something if you have to patience to type it into a converter and figure it out.

Rating: 5/5. Loved it, will continue the series, may even reread someday. Probably want to own.