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A review by mxhermit
Nyxia by Scott Reintgen
2.0
An interstellar journey sounds like a terrific premise. Secrets, training, all sorts of things before this team of teenagers can make it to another world and harvest something only they, as young people revered by the inhabitants of the planet, can get.
In actually, what I found was a rather dense book with an overabundance of details portrayed in a painstakingly slow manner that became a burden at 48%.
The story is told from Emmett's perspective and about a quarter of the way through, I started feeling like Nyxia wasted an opportunity. Emmett's views of his fellow travelers started feeling flat ten days into their space journey of a year. Repetitive observations made for a boring reading experience; I wondered what it would be like if we'd had multiple points of view. That is a method that can be confusing if the voices aren't unique enough, but the writing so far was decent enough to make me think that Reintgen could've made a good example of multiple p.o.v.s. done right.
There were a lot of details drawn out through the book. Things about how they had to train and then those instances broken down even further; time spent going over nyxia, the resource the company Babel is over that can be manipulated into anything; "romantic" relationships that never felt real; and so on. There was too much focus on what felt like minutiae to be exciting. It felt like reading a textbook with some brief moments of human connection.
Emmett's battle with his moral compass versus the amazing financial opportunity that Babel offers because he's willing to travel to a new planet (Eden) was interesting. There were flashbacks to his childhood when his grandmother taught him how to control his anger with a mental filing system. His father and mother, though we barely hear from them in the book, are guideposts for him during horrible tests that pit him against the other teens of Genesis I and, eventually, Genesis II. This wavering between right, wrong, and what that means to him was one of the facets of the story that remained relatively intriguing throughout.
If you like details and having battles happen over and over again in a spaceship to see who gets to go planet-side, then I think Nyxia will be a good match for you. I didn't care for it as an overall work because I don't think the writing made up for lackluster plot elements and I got bored.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
In actually, what I found was a rather dense book with an overabundance of details portrayed in a painstakingly slow manner that became a burden at 48%.
The story is told from Emmett's perspective and about a quarter of the way through, I started feeling like Nyxia wasted an opportunity. Emmett's views of his fellow travelers started feeling flat ten days into their space journey of a year. Repetitive observations made for a boring reading experience; I wondered what it would be like if we'd had multiple points of view. That is a method that can be confusing if the voices aren't unique enough, but the writing so far was decent enough to make me think that Reintgen could've made a good example of multiple p.o.v.s. done right.
There were a lot of details drawn out through the book. Things about how they had to train and then those instances broken down even further; time spent going over nyxia, the resource the company Babel is over that can be manipulated into anything; "romantic" relationships that never felt real; and so on. There was too much focus on what felt like minutiae to be exciting. It felt like reading a textbook with some brief moments of human connection.
Emmett's battle with his moral compass versus the amazing financial opportunity that Babel offers because he's willing to travel to a new planet (Eden) was interesting. There were flashbacks to his childhood when his grandmother taught him how to control his anger with a mental filing system. His father and mother, though we barely hear from them in the book, are guideposts for him during horrible tests that pit him against the other teens of Genesis I and, eventually, Genesis II. This wavering between right, wrong, and what that means to him was one of the facets of the story that remained relatively intriguing throughout.
If you like details and having battles happen over and over again in a spaceship to see who gets to go planet-side, then I think Nyxia will be a good match for you. I didn't care for it as an overall work because I don't think the writing made up for lackluster plot elements and I got bored.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.