Illuminae, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, is the first book of a young adult series titled The Illuminae Files. The story is set in the year 2575 and most of it takes place in space. The two main characters are Kady Grant and Ezra Mason. Kady, a seventeen-year-old girl with dyed pink hair, who is also a secret hacker, is aboard the spaceship Hypatia. Ezra, who is Kady’s ex-boyfriend, is also seventeen, enjoys playing a sport called geeball, and travels on the spaceship Alexander. The reason that Kady and Ezra are on two spaceships is that a corporation called BeiTech attacked their planet, Kerenza IV. Another important character is AIDAN, an AI (artificial intelligence) who runs the Alexander. The story takes off when refugees from a ship called Copernicus, who are infected with a manmade virus created by BeiTech, try to board the Alexander. This virus was designed to attack the part of the brain that controls fear, and to make the infected people very scared. But because the virus has mutated, people who get sick turn into psychopathic murderers. To make things even worse, AIDAN, the AI, has also gone insane. Releasing the infected refugees into the Alexander and watching the ensuing bloodshed, AIDAN thinks, “Am I not merciful?” Kady and Ezra switch places as first-person narrators for most of the story, in more-or-less alternating chapters called files. Occasionally, a file is inserted from a random character’s point of view. Later, AIDAN’s perspective comes to replace Ezra’s—for reasons that I can’t explain without spoiling a major plot point. One thing that makes Illuminae different from most other books I have read is the formatting, which is both unique and beautiful. When AIDAN comes under attack and begins to glitch, this is shown in an ingenious fashion by random capital letters appearing in AIDAN’s sentences. Curse words are blacked out. Text is interpolated with diagrams, lists, hand-written annotations, and all sorts of schematics. Just by removing my hardcover’s dust jacket, I found so many easter eggs and hidden surprises underneath. Even though Illuminae is a horror sci-fi story, there is quite a bit of humor too, even in the serious parts. At one point, when Ezra sends a drunken text to Kady, it sounds like a drunken teen, complete with horrible punctuation, grammar, and capitalization. I also liked that when Ezra texts his friend James, it seems like a conversation between two immature teens. The characters’ personalities are rich and varied. Some people are silly, some are loving, and AIDAN specifically is sophisticated and poetic, even in its thoughts: “If I breathed, I would sigh. I would scream. I would cry.” This particular phrase appears twice in the book, two “chapters” apart. The second time I read it, it gave me chills. Reading Illuminae I had the strange sense of watching an AI gain human emotions when it used to have none, and develop empathy without being reprogrammed. I was glued to the story, but I felt I was a bit young for the gory parts and graphic descriptions of murder. I would recommend this book for readers thirteen and up. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Ember, 2017. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
Book Reviews
Keeper of the Lost Cities Book 1, Reviewed by Nova, 11
I first read Keeper of the Lost Cities on October of 2020, for the Stone Soup Book Club. I had nothing to read, and the book was in my favorite genre: adventure fantasy. I had previously enjoyed many fantasy series: Harry Potter, Wings of Fire, How to Train Your Dragon, Artemis Fowl, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Percy Jackson, of course. Basically, 90% of my personal library is just adventure fantasy. And so I thought, Well, why not? It’s not like anything bad could come of trying out a new fantasy book. Little did I know I was not only right, but I would develop a massive obsession with every aspect of Keeper of the Lost Cities. The protagonist of Keeper of the Lost Cities is a girl named Sophie. At the start of the story, Sophie is an outsider, amazingly smart with a photographic memory, and she has just been invited to Yale University at twelve years old—but she has a secret. Sophie can read minds. She always knew she was strange, but soon finds out that she is an elf in a human world. Another elf, an older boy named Fitz, introduces Sophie to the Elvin world. Sophie has to come to grips with the fact that her human parents and little sister cannot be her real family, because she is an elf. Worse, she must leave her human family and her pet behind when she goes live with the elves. Sophie has many adventures in the scattered estates and cities the elves call The Lost Cities. She finds out more about her powers of telepathy, meets a goblin and lots of gnomes, learns to use a “leaping crystal,” and even fights against kidnappers. Keeper of the Lost Cities is the first book in a series of ten. One odd detail about the numbering of the series is that the tenth book is labeled “Book 9,” because the ninth book is labeled “Book 8.5.” All other books have regular numbers. I have just finished Book 9, and it is a major rollercoaster of emotions, overflowing with revelations that tie into previous books. Every time a question is answered, ten more are raised—but more on that later. I would probably recommend Keeper of the Lost Cities to ten-year-olds and up, because there is plenty of blood, gore, pain, and cruelty. I would not recommend it to people who throw up or have nightmares easily. To be honest, on the outside, you would not think of Keeper of the Lost Cities as much different from any other fantasy book, complete with goblins, trolls, ogres, dwarves, gnomes—and elves, of course. But what makes Keeper of the Lost Cities different from most other fantasy series is its riveting plot. It shows you what you are supposed to think, then says it just in case you missed it, and two chapters later, when you are positive you know what is going on, it reveals that the total opposite is true. Shannon Messenger does not just tell you the story, she makes you feel like you are experiencing it, without holding anything back. Keeper of the Lost Cities is emotional, and jarring, and soothing, and chock-full of sadness, and joy, and anger, and love, and the best part is that when you read the book, you can feel the main character’s emotions as well as sensations. Keeper of the Lost Cities is deep, yet light, and humorous, yet tear-jerking, and this might just be me, but flipping through its pages, lost in the story’s embrace, Keeper of the Lost Cities feels like an old friend, there to comfort me and help me through whatever I’m going through, or just make me laugh, or put a smile on my face. That’s why Keeper of the Lost Cities is my favorite book series of all. Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger. Aladdin Paperbacks, 2013. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone, Reviewed by Pragnya, 13
Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone is very experimental in the way its lens plays with the reader’s perceptions throughout the story. The character through whom we experience the sleepy town of Nowhereville, 13-year-old Mallory Moss, arguably isn’t the protagonist of this story. The character arc she undergoes as the story progresses is very nonlinear due to the nature of the storytelling. Told in flashbacks from days leading up to “The Incident,” while switching to its aftermath (in the present), Mallory attempts to find her missing friend with the help of ex-friends Ingrid and Kath. When Jennifer goes missing, the entire town is shaken up. Mallory, our narrator, is at the heart of the tragedy. The book starts out framing Mallory as a popular girl at the top of her middle school social hierarchy, with Reagan and Tess as her closest friends. As both plot lines progress, however, Keller’s clever narrative choices carefully examine themes of change, social structures, bullying, and friendship through a realistic, honest point of view. The storyline leading up to “The Incident” starts when Jennifer Chan moves into the house across the street. Mallory’s lens through which she views the world shifts. Jennifer Chan is, as the book describes her, extraterrestrial. Mallory befriends her when she first moves to Nowhereville, but soon feels like she is forced to cut her off in order to maintain her perception in school. Mallory brings her past decisions to light and navigates her friendships with Ingrid and Kath, Reagan and Tess, but more specifically, her short-lived initial friendship with Jennifer, the titular character of the story, who believes we are not alone in our existence. She believes there are aliens somewhere, out there, and we learn about her backstory through snippets of her diary, titled “Jennifer Chan’s Guide To The Universe, Vol 1. through 7.” Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone is an incredibly relatable and gripping mystery/middle school drama that uses its narrator to weave together a story about self-identity, and I found myself and my friends throughout the pages of the book. I would highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone by Tae Keller. Random House Books for Young Readers, 2022. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
