Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1) in Shut Up & Read

Nov 10, 2019 Marla rated it it was amazing

Shelves: girl-power, young-adult, recommend-frankie, favorites-ya, boys, challenged, romantic-suspense, series, zz-2019, science-fiction

Wow, fantastic book. I like the format of emails, instant messages, video transcriptions, blogs, etc. In some ways, it takes a bit to get used to the bits and pieces of the story through the scraps of data. But I have suspended my life to finish the last 25% of the book. So I strongly recommend that you don't start the last 25% at 1 a.m. or some other vital time, like before you need to leave for school or work. I cannot wait to read the next book, but I am afraid that it cannot keep up this lev Wow, fantastic book. I like the format of emails, instant messages, video transcriptions, blogs, etc. In some ways, it takes a bit to get used to the bits and pieces of the story through the scraps of data. But I have suspended my life to finish the last 25% of the book. So I strongly recommend that you don't start the last 25% at 1 a.m. or some other vital time, like before you need to leave for school or work. I cannot wait to read the next book, but I am afraid that it cannot keep up this level of cleverness. And I will miss Kady and Ezra when we take up with a different couple.

I had no idea what this book was about when I started it, besides that it was a YA science fiction romance, but I didn't realize it was also a horror, suspense story. The best I can describe it would be: HAL meets Across the Universe or Fortune's Pawn (adult not YA) or even Divergent or some other amazingly brave and determined, nerdy heroine and her snarky but worthy boyfriend amidst an apocalyptic crisis with zombie-like foes. If it sounds remotely interesting to you, you should definitely read it!

Don't let the length scare you, many of the pages are almost graphic or are text/chat conversations that have much fewer words than a normal book page would have. And don't give up on the weird, choppy format, the end is such a rush that the slow, awkward start is more than outweighed.

A trusted GoodReads friend, Matthew said he loved the audiobook, and I can't imagine since the graphics in the book were amazing. So I think after I read the trilogy, I have to go back and revisit this series in audiobooks.

And inspired by Talking Dead
In Memorium: (view spoiler) ...more

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Nov 16, 2015 Cathy rated it liked it

Shelves: romance, young-adult, science-fiction, a-library-reserved

3.5 stars. I was predisposed to like the authors because not only did they mention their dogs in their bio, but that they were rescue dogs. I know I'm a sucker for dogs, but I'm also a former nonprofit professional too and I'm all for marketing to key demographics. You have to use every avenue you have.

On the first page I was already wishing this was really a mixed media experience. The different entries in the book are text messages and transcripts of audio recordings and videos. At some point 3.5 stars. I was predisposed to like the authors because not only did they mention their dogs in their bio, but that they were rescue dogs. I know I'm a sucker for dogs, but I'm also a former nonprofit professional too and I'm all for marketing to key demographics. You have to use every avenue you have.

On the first page I was already wishing this was really a mixed media experience. The different entries in the book are text messages and transcripts of audio recordings and videos. At some point in the future something like this is going to be even more cool, once they start taking advantage of the technology that's available and once everyone has access to it. There are some iPad apps now, but I don't think they're widely accessed.

Some of the design aspects were so fantastic, so creative. They used text moving around a page to show ships in flight. There were some very powerful pictures and images. They used black and white pages and letters to establish characters' personalities and demonstrate drama and all sorts of other factors; they used the contrast of the black and white book to its best advantage in many places. It's bizarre to me how much I enjoyed half of the design and really disliked the other half. You can see pictures of the book on many other reviews and see some of the most effective pages, they really were great. The ones that showed movement were the best, when they showed ships in battle or in flight, or someone moving in space. Those pages also have more photorealistic pictures as the backgrounds so they seem more modern. I'm impressed that the authors came up with these ideas and that the publisher took the risk of going for it, it's brilliant and really beautiful, at least part of the time.

But this book would have been a lot more effective for me if they hadn't used such old-fashioned styles. The story takes place in 2575, but it often had the look of a book from the 1950s. That older look didn't come off as charming, it came off as odd and confusing. The fonts were ancient, the designs were old-fashioned. It really was confusing because I couldn't understand what the technology level was, what I was seeing didn't match with what I was reading, I kept waiting for a twist or something that would help me understand the mismatch. They explained some things so they made sense, like why the kids had to text each other instead of using video between the ships, a communication method that's starting to seem old-fashioned now as people are using more and more video chats and sending voice messages. It was explained that low bandwidth communications wouldn't be detected. But other things were odd. The book used a paperclip as a symbol to indicate what type of document some of the items in the book were; that's outdated now, what will it mean to people in five hundred years? It was cool that they put the plans of the ships in, but they looked ancient (the plans, not the ships). I don't get why they made a book that was so creative in so many ways, but then mired it in the past with other design choices.

There were a lot of other little things that bothered me in this book, it was just one of those that made me write down a lot of notes. Before I complain about all of them, I want to say that I did like it. It was just one of those books where things kept jumping out at me as being off or irritating and pulling me out of the story, but I was still turning the pages and enjoying the story. I liked Kady and Ezra. Kady felt like a bit more than a typical hard-headed teenage heroine who wouldn't listen to anyone and did whatever she wanted no matter what anyone said. She was that, but she had reasons, her circumstances were really awful in so many ways and she was coping in the very best way she could. I felt for those kids and what they were going through. It was a more creative teenage "post-apocalyptic" story than most, combining the destruction of their planet with the plague on the ships, and we don't often see kids dealing with these issues in an advanced scientific society. I definitely felt for Kady when she said she couldn't sleep. And at those terrible group therapy sessions. Her motivation felt very true and I could relate to that too. I hated imagining feeling that scared and alone at seventeen. When she was trying to make her way through the ship near the end it was pretty intense too. I wondered if someone was going to make a game out of it, it was such a well-described and conveyed series of challenges and encounters, and they already had the mission set up by people involved, resources, goals, advantages and disadvantages. (I bet a movie is already in the works too.) AIDAN was an interesting character, even if the way that he was conveyed often irritated me. At its core, this is a good book, a good story. I get why so many people love it.

But there were a lot of things that I didn't understand. It was the year 2575 but the authors didn't take advantage of that at all, it might as well have been 2020 for how much things had changed culturally. People are going to still be casually referring to HAL five hundred years from now? Do teenagers now know who HAL is now? Aren't they the primary audience for this book? How about Dostoevsky? Who is this book written for? It's listed as a YA book at my library, but all of the references in it were to things most kids wouldn't know. I get trying to use classics that would be recognizable in any decade so the book doesn't feel dated a couple of years after it's published, but at least try to pick things that might resonate with younger people. "You're slower than German opera." In a huge interplanetary human space system five hundred years in the future, would young people insult each other that way? And again, is it relevant to kids now? Or most adults for that matter. They might assume it's ugly, but not that it's slow. It's cool to have references to Shakespeare in books for kids, it just seemed weird in something this far in the future this far from Earth in addition to all of the other odd references, and with nothing in there that was more current to the time in the book, no made up future references to add a more "contemporary" edge. Usually books in the future will use a wide range of references, some from our time and a couple fictional that are supposed to have happened after our time. Why wasn't there any attempt to make it feel more modern or futuristic? And if people are using "Unipedia" with that same boring layout, and from their mother's basements "wearing tinfoil hats", in 2575, then we have completely failed as a species. No progress has been made in design and layout at least, none at all, really?

And how about redacting the cursing? Thousands of people could get killed in the book, oh, sorry, "report," and tons of people were swearing like the sailors they technically were the whole time (of course, they were in a horrible mess), but the adult director that this was being reported to thought that the swear words needed to be blacked out for some reason? It was so dumb and so irritating. This isn't a book for middle-aged kids. Ezra turned eighteen during the story, so Kady must have been seventeen too, the book is clearly aimed at high school kids and adults. It was super annoying, either put the words in or keep them out but half way was just inane.

There were other issues. Logic issues, for example. Why would reports that were prepared on a computer have so many stricken-out corrections? That hasn't happened since the days of typewriters. Mistakes are deleted, they never appear on the page. You have to will yourself to suspend disbelief pretty hard for many parts of this book. I obviously wasn't so successful at it. I had a hard time believing that AIDAN's thoughts were even available in text format anywhere, it was so different from anything proposed in any other book I've read. Obviously, if they weren't printed we as readers couldn't see them, considering the style of the book, so you have to swallow hard and go with it. But why would a computer AI's thoughts be printed, for what reason? Why would they ever be in text format at all? These are fundamental issues with the book, not just a style thing, change a font and it's all better. Obviously the writers and publishers thought the trade-offs between things that made no sense and being able to write their book was worth it and lots of readers have too, but I couldn't have given this the green light in the form it's in now, I just couldn't have. I don't know how to fix it, and I would want to fix it because there's a great deal of value here, but there are so many things that don't hold water.

Here was a good one, something that shows how oblivious the authors and editors were to logic: how would AIDAN know what the last thing that a guy who ejected himself out through an airlock because of the madness felt? "The last thing he feels before losing consciousness is the saliva on his tongue beginning to boil." The authors even use the line again in the acknowledgements, as if it was so great a thing. It was very dramatic, but ridiculous. Maybe he needed to pee or his skin burned or the last thing was one of dozens of other sensations, how would the computer know which it was? There could have been dozens of other ways to write that and still have it be horrifying, but have it be something AIDAN could have actually observed, it was just so dumb.

And who edited this book? Kady couldn't wipe her tears in a HAZMAT suit, rightly so, but some other guy could kiss his wedding ring? How? Bang it up against his face plate? When Kady was in an environmental suit later on (she had just been outside the ship in it a bit ago), how was her hair drifting around her face in the low gravity when she came inside? I'm pretty sure hair sticking outside a helmet would mess up a good airtight seal. I know she kept the helmet on because there was no air in the area she was in, not to mention the virus.

I thought it wouldn't be too long because the format meant that it wasn't text-dense but it was long, too long. Zombie/plague stories usually are a bit long because part of the horror is the spiral down that starts slow and keeps getting more dire and faster and unstoppable and more horrifying as it goes. If it was just boom-boom-over there wouldn't be time for the horror to build and crescendo. But it was long. By the early 400s I couldn't believe it was only two-thirds through, I was ready to wrap it up and I still had two hundred pages to go. And I know it's ironic because this review is way too long also.

So there was a good story there but it was somewhat buried under too much stuff altogether and some bad style and editing choices. It felt like the book was the rough sketch of something that could have been so much better if they'd used more modern and crisp designs. But the stuff that they did right was spectacularly right. The way that they used text design to show movement and contrast was super cool. They created energy and drama in a way that was truly unique. I definitely applaud the authors for doing something new and the publishers for taking the risk in putting it out there. I'm glad it paid off. ...more

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Aug 01, 2014 Yzabel Ginsberg rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: young-adult, science-fiction, romance, action, computers-technology, space, ai-and-robots

4.5 stars. I had to wait for 4 months to finally be able to borrow it from the library (10 people ahead of me, bah), and I admit I was worried about the whole epistolary/chats/format thing, because it's too easy to just slap "witty" formatting on pages and call that a good book. Fortunately, the story and characters really hooked me--yes, even though the "chat-speak" on some pages would normally quickly have annoyed me in other circumstances.

There was romance, but not of the stupid kind that cas 4.5 stars. I had to wait for 4 months to finally be able to borrow it from the library (10 people ahead of me, bah), and I admit I was worried about the whole epistolary/chats/format thing, because it's too easy to just slap "witty" formatting on pages and call that a good book. Fortunately, the story and characters really hooked me--yes, even though the "chat-speak" on some pages would normally quickly have annoyed me in other circumstances.

There was romance, but not of the stupid kind that casts a shadow on the whole plot. While Ezra and Kady do think about each other, after their world was turned upside down and forced them to reconsider the importance of a breakup for what I shall call "puny teenager reasons", they didn't spend their time mooning, groping each other, and sending the rest of their crews to hell just because feeeeeeelings. Contrary to what happens too often in many YA novels (you know, "the world is ending but we're still too busy pondering who we want to go out with"). It wasn't the best romance ever, but at least it was far from being the worst I read.

The format: fun to read, although I tended to prefer some aspects over others (the "chatspeak" conversations, for instance, weren't my favourites). I think this was because of the whole "report" side of it, which made for a strange dichotomy in the narrative: both very factual ("here are recordings from camera X") and unreliable (how were those recordings recovered and put back together?).

The characters: so I'll be honest, Ezra and Kady were "good" to read about but not really more. Ezra enlisted to help, not knowing much to what he was signing up for, yet aware someone should help, and gradually revealing a few things about his family that were hard to suspect at first. I didn't care for Kady much at first, because of her sullen, do-not-want-to-do-that attitude; however, she redeemed herself later, and anyway was more of an action girl with a bit of romance on the side than the usual (and annoying) lovestruck heroine who lets The Boy do all the work.

Yet as far as I'm concerned, the one character I really, really loved reading about was AIDAN. It's crazy and damaged and desperately trying to latch upon what's left of its programming, pushing its core directives in directions that may or may not be completely at odds with what the crews of the three spaceships would like (or need). And in doing so, in being so, it was all so human, spiralling towards both destruction and a new awareness.

And, frankly, I just loved that AI. It added at least a full star to my rating. No kidding. And just for AIDAN, I'd read it again. (Also for the unreliable parts I mentioned above, and the way they tie together, and you'd better pay attention to a few tiny details here and there.) ...more

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Apr 10, 2018 Stormi (StormReads) rated it liked it

I am not a sci-fi reader but I have been hearing so many things about this trilogy and then I heard that it was really cool on audio so thought I would give it a try. I don't think I would have lasted through the whole thing if I hadn't listened to it because honestly it really just wasn't my thing but I did enjoy the audio version a tad bit.

I was a bit confused at first but then I got all sorted out. It starts with a war on the planet they are on (can't remember the name) and the two main chara ...more

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Jan 27, 2020 Jenn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: hallway-shelf-2020, 2020

Wow. Just wow. This book was such a huge surprise. I never thought I would enjoy it as much as I did. It pulled me in from the very first and never let go. It was in turns exciting, heartbreaking and funny. I absolutely loved it. I loved the main characters, loved the side characters. Phenomenally done.

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Mar 06, 2017 Monica Millard rated it it was amazing

Shelves: kick-butt-chic, character-love, fav-character, favorites, own-paper, own-electronic, sci-fi, loved, 2017-reads

I loved this book. I loved it enough to actually enjoy the weird layout. The characters were fantastic even the (view spoiler) AI turned out to be an interesting character. ...more

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