Achilles (Deep Sky Saga, #1)

by Greg Boose

[Liz (Bent Bookworm)]

~*Full review here on The Bent Bookworm!*~

2.5 stars...GoodReads, half stars would be great at ANY time!

I wanted to love this book. It sounded so cool, and like a break from the ton of fantasy/fairy tale type books I’ve been reading. Achilles was a book that, try as hard as I might, I just could not really get into. However, if you’re big on science fiction you might love it! It did remind me of the first season of LOST…which, I, ahem, also discontinued a couple of episodes into Season 2 because I simply couldn’t stand all the craziness and constantly losing people.

Me, pretty much the entire book.

Characters:

I’m very character oriented when I read books. Characters are more important to me than world-building or excitement factor. In Achilles, the characters feel very flat and many of them feel the same. I got so confused because I could NOT keep many of the supporting cast separate. Not helped by the fact that many of them weren’t even given names (referred to as “the hacker,” etc.) until several chapters after they appeared. Jonah, our MC, I thought was going to be likable but he turns out to have a bad case of navel-gazing and I just…cannot. I feel bad for him but I spent most of my time being annoyed at the way he was written. Also, he’s supposed to be this hard-ass kid that’s suffered abuse and came out still standing, yet his reactions to a lot of the things that happen are not how abuse victims and soldiers (he’s been in a military training facility for some time by the time the book starts) react. It makes the whole thing kind of unbelievable – really jolted me out of my suspension of disbelief, which is necessary for any kind of fantastical fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, steampunk, fill-in-the-blank). I really didn’t feel anything for the rest of the characters either, and I was a little – ok, a lot – put off by how some of them did unexplained 180-degree flips without any real reason. Very suspicious and never explained, so the conclusion I am left with is that the author just…didn’t notice? Ugh.

Oh, also – CAN WE PLEASE HAVE MALE AND FEMALE INTERACTIONS WHERE THE MALE IS NOT SUDDENLY OVERCOME WITH AN UNAVOIDABLE HARD-ON?? I swear, so many times, when a book is written from the male perspective, he’s so distracted by female characters physicality that he turns into an idiot and it gets really old. I refuse to believe that the male population of the world is run solely by hormones.

World-building:

I think this is where the author spent most of his time! The world of the moon Achilles is harsh and brutal and I actually felt grossed out by some of the descriptions of the creatures inhabiting it (hard to do…I’m an EMT and few things turn my stomach anymore). It seemed like something new was introduced in every chapter. Sometimes it was hard to keep up but it was definitely intriguing.


Feels:

I usually put this section first, but this time I am putting it last because…er. I really didn’t have any. This book failed at making me feel anything but relief it was over. I am not interested in finding out what happens next. It didn’t really end on a cliffhanger, though there are lots of things about Earth’s colonization of Thetis that are not explained and have very dark implications – the main points of the story were wrapped up and that’s all I cared about.


Thank you very much to Diversion Books for sending me the ARC (this in no way influenced my review)! I was delighted to read and review even if it turned out to not be my cup of tea.

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