Goddess in the Machine (Goddess in the Machine, #1)

by Lora Beth Johnson

Andra wakes up from a cryogenic sleep 1,000 years later than she was supposed to, forcing her to team up with an exiled prince to navigate an unfamiliar planet in this smart, thrilling sci-fi adventure, perfect for fans of Renegades and Aurora Rising.

When Andra wakes up, she's drowning.

Not only that, but she's in a hot, dirty cave, it's the year 3102, and everyone keeps calling her Goddess. When Andra went into a cryonic sleep for a trip across the galaxy, she expected to wake up in a hundred years, not a thousand. Worst of all, the rest of the colonists--including her family and friends--are dead. They died centuries ago, and for some reason, their descendants think Andra's a deity. She knows she's nothing special, but she'll play along if it means she can figure out why she was left in stasis and how to get back to Earth.

Zhade, the exiled bastard prince of Eerensed, has other plans. Four years ago, the sleeping Goddess's glass coffin disappeared from the palace, and Zhade devoted himself to finding it. Now he's hoping the Goddess will be the key to taking his rightful place on the throne--if he can get her to play her part, that is. Because if his people realize she doesn't actually have the power to save their dying planet, they'll kill her.

With a vicious monarch on the throne and a city tearing apart at the seams, Zhade and Andra might never be able to unlock the mystery of her fate, let alone find a way to unseat the king, especially since Zhade hasn't exactly been forthcoming with Andra. And a thousand years from home, is there any way of knowing that Earth is better than the planet she's woken to?

• ISBN10: 1984835920
• ISBN13: 9781984835925
• Publish Date: 30 June 2020
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Razorbill
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 400
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781984835925

Reviews

A story about a girl that is cryogenic-ally frozen and travels to another planet for humans to colonize, but something goes wrong, and she wakes up a thousand years later than she was supposed to. Well helloooo there, this story is right up my alley! My favourite sci-fi trope is exactly this. So I had high hopes for Goddess in the Machine and boy did it deliver… kind of.

Firstly, what I loved about it was that the author really thought about what life would be like in a thousand years from now, including language. How does language change and adapt over such a long period of time? In this story, the people that had lived throughout these one thousand years were speaking Andra's language, but it was almost unrecognizable, and it took her time to work out what phrases meant. This level of detail really fascinated me. I really liked this take on it.

Secondly, I really enjoyed the world building and seeing what was different. The world was ravaged by weird storms that almost looked and acted like black holes, but then they would dissipate. It kind of gave me Under the Never Sky vibes, these storms just seemed so mysterious, what on earth could have happened on this planet for these storms to exist?

Thirdly, I really liked just how many plot twists there were in this story. One would be revealed and just when you have recovered from that shock another would be revealed, then another, and another. It was great. I liked the dimension these reveals gave to the story and these were one of the main reasons I kept reading.

Now, for the things I didn't like. While I really loved all the above, there were just some things that really dragged my rating down. One major thing was that the middle slowed down quite a bit, the excitement of the story was lost. I actually nearly DNF'ed it because I was bored and frankly, I didn't like half of the characters, which was a huge bummer. Nothing really drew me to any of them and by the end of the book, I barely liked any of the characters at all, including Andra. The only reason I kept reading was because of the reveals, I wanted to know how it all played out.

So while the story was such a great idea, I really enjoyed the concept, and I loved the level of detail that the author thought of for Goddess in the Machine - I genuinely have no interest in reading the next book in this series. Simply because I do not care about any of the characters, and I'm not very interested in finding out what happens to them. It's a shame really.

[cornerfolds]

DNF @ page 106